


The Sun On Your Back (And Other Visible Things)

by Silverlace_Vine



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon ages, Citadel of Ricks, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Season 3 Spoilers, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Worldbuilding, but fucking duh, if the pairing doesn't tell you it's incest, in-universe alternate universe, you're too dumb to be watching the show
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-04-24 05:57:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14349348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silverlace_Vine/pseuds/Silverlace_Vine
Summary: In many realities, Rick and Morty are in a healthy, passionate, romantic relationship.An ex-Citadel Morty comes to Earth Dimension C-137 for help with a problem in one of them.--Tags updated as they occur to me.





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Hey, Rick? Are we going anywhere today, I was gonna go with Summer to-- huh?"

Past a certain point, seeing "Rick stuff" stops being weird enough to warrant much surprise. Bizarre technology, brightly-colored space drugs, other Ricks, exotic plants and minerals, most of it doesn't even make decent dinner conversation anymore.

This time, Morty's train of thought is derailed completely by the presence of a second Morty in the garage, having just been interrupted in a conversation with a solitary Rick. He looks more prepared for adventure than most, a brown windbreaker over his usual (the word that comes to mind first is "default") yellow t-shirt and hiking boots instead of his sneakers, a duffle bag in one hand and a near-empty portal gun in the other.

"Oh, h-hey." He smiles and tries his very best not to be awkward. Most of the Mortys he's met were terrified or delusional or both, but this one gives the impression of Having His Shit Together. "Bad time?"

"Yes! I-I-I mean no, it's-- you're just in time, is what I mean," Other-Morty hurries to cut Rick off and pull his counterpart into the room, shutting the door behind him. "I need your help."

"Why? What's going on?"

"Great, now there's two of you. This is supposed to be a garage, not a dumpster, Mortys." Rick takes a quick hit from his flask, scowling with the headache he knows is about to crawl out from under his eyeballs. "He wants me to make him some portal fluid and build a machine for some subpar Citadel Rick who can't hack it."

"Can you talk to him for me? Please?" Other-Morty swallows and tries not to look too desperate, but Morty's seen that expression on his own face too many times to brush it off.

"Uh... well, I-I'll try, but we both know I can't make any promises." Morty pats Other-Morty on the shoulder, takes a deep, steadying breath, and faces Rick, who's already emptied his flask and is rooting around in the cabinets for the vodka. "You have plenty of portal fluid and you like building stuff, why don't you want to help him?"

"One, because he's a Citadel Morty who doesn't know how to make portal fluid himself. That means he stole it from the Rick who owns it or looted it off his coURRRPse, which means when whoever's in charge tracks it down, they're going to scan it, find out the last refill came from this dimension, and then I have to decide whether I want to pay a seven hundred flurbo fine for encouraging the dereliction of a Morty or get automated debt-collection calls from the fucking Citadel for the rest of my life. And two, because _fuck the Citadel_ , Morty."

Other-Morty clutches the portal gun closer to his chest as if he's afraid of having it taken out of his hands; Morty catches a glimpse of a tattoo on his wrist, though he can't see more than a few lines of blue ink. "But I'm not a Citadel Morty anymore! And I didn't steal my Rick's portal gun!"

"Here's some wisdom from Grampa Rick for you, Man-Purse Morty--"

"It's a duffle bag."

"-- _Man-Purse MoURRty_ : the Citadel mindset, i-i-it's like herpes, okay? Not everybody who gets it shows symptoms right away, but once you have it, you have it forever. Take your genital-wart-ridden paradigm someplace else. Maybe try Doofus Rick, he'd help you for two turds and a ketchup packet." Rick hits paydirt when he finds a full 40-ounce of whiskey; he refills his flask, then puts the flask away and swigs from the bottle. "I'll give you enough fluid to get back there, but don't-- don't misinterpret that as a begrudging desire to help you, or me being sweet-talked into cooperating because my Morty has sentimental influence over me, I just want you to leave."

Morty rolls his eyes. "What about the machine he wants you to build? What does it do?"

"Don't know, don't care."

Man-Purse Morty reaches into his bag and pulls out a small stack of blueprints, and pointedly hands them to Morty before turning his attention back to Rick. "Y-y-y-you don't wanna help me out of the goodness of your crusty, withered beer nut of a heart, I get that. That's o-- th-that's fair, your time is valuable. I can trade you for it."

"Thing about trades is, you have to have something I want, and you don't."

"I have stuff! " Man-Purse Morty begins frantically digging through the contents of his (apparently very full) bag. "You can keep the blueprints when you're done, and I can give you the cash to cover the fines, plus an extra five hundred for incidentals..." His face falls a little as he gets to the bottom of the bag and finds the pickings are slimmer than he thought. "F-fifteen thousand and eighty-seven Blips and Chitz tickets... a-a-and..." He hesitates, preparing for Rick's reaction the way most people might brace themselves before pissing on an electrified fence.

Carefully, gingerly, Man-Purse Morty pulls out a square box, lopsidedly wrapped with blue-and-silver paper in way that screams "affectionate" and "incompetent". It's a shit job, the edges are misaligned and the corners are uneven and lumpy, but the bow on top is strangely perfect: a very long satin ribbon in the same cyan as Rick's favorite shirt, hand-tied in a complex, flowery knot. The little gift tag, written in Morty's distinctly small-yet-crisp handwriting, reads "Happy Birthday".

Rick lazily tears the paper off with with a lack of interest in the heartfelt sentiment that approaches actual boredom, and inside, he finds a liquor bottle. It's a little smaller than his flask and decorated with a handmade label, one with the same lettering as the gift tag.

"...Wafer cookie flavored vodka? Really? Wafer cookies are all about _texture_ , Morty, a cookie in liquid form is just drinkable sugar."

"Fuck you, C-137! It's not-- ugh, wh-wh-whatever, if you don't want it, that's fine, i-i-it's not even for you anyway." Man-Purse Morty tries to snap the bottle back, but Rick's already adding it to the pile with the rest of the trade offerings. The shreds of wrapping paper become a heap of trash on the garage floor, and Man-Purse Morty tries and fails not to look like he wants to cry.

Telling him to stop being such an asshole won't help, so Morty aims for a distraction instead. Something technical, something he can be interested in and feel superior about. "Rick, did you actually look at these blueprints?" He gently shoves his counterpart away from the workbench. "I-I'm not sure what it is, but um.. y-you might actually wanna see this, it looks... serious."

Rick scowls, but decides it's easier to just look at the stupid things than keep repeating himself over and over. "Fine, Morty, but if this turns out to be bullshit, I'm telling Jerry you've been secretly twins this entire time, the new one needs a fatherly sex talk, and you're both curious about anal." Rick spends a few seconds intensely poring over the pages, expression going from annoyed, to surprised, to... unreadable. Not confused, not intrigued, not angry, but whatever interest he's discovered makes him slow down, flip back a few pages to look over them again.

"I don't need the whole thing." Man-Purse Morty shoots a quick, grateful look at his counterpart and gets a nod in return. It's not a clear 'yes' yet, but it's enough to give him hope. "Just the actuator."

It's reassuring to Morty himself, too. There's a certain amount of satisfaction to be had in helping his other selves; other Ricks tend to be assholes and other Mortys tend to be melancholy at best, and either too stupid or too traumatized to be of much use to anyone but their Ricks. This one seemed more on his level, if "Mortyness" was a measurable quality. _Second-Mortiest_ , he thinks. "Wh-what does it actually do?"

Rick stands up, tucks the wafer-cookie vodka away in one of his pockets, and puts the bundled pile of flurbos and tickets into a cabinet. "The short version is, it uses my portal formula to swap out damaged brain cells for fresh, genetically identical ones from other dimensions."

"Doesn't opening portals inside someone...?" Morty grimaces, thinking of all the times he's seen a portal bloom open in the middle of a living body: solids are neatly bisected, semi-solids tend to flop apart and every once in a while, they explode. He's never seen it happen directly inside a human skull before, but he can picture it well enough, and the thought is nauseating.

"According to this, the microportals are keyed specifically to individual cells. No fuss, no muss, at least for the patient getting the fresh ones. It's like changing a burnt-out light bulb. No idea about what happens to the others, except they're getting portals opened inside their brains, so y'know, probably, they die."

"...So you're saying it-- you use it to kill other versions of someone, just to get one healthy one?" Morty turns back to his counterpart and tries not to sound too judgmental; curing brain damage is still pretty benevolent by Rick's standards, and it's a lot less brutal than some of the other technically-good stuff he's done in the past. "Why do you want that?"

"No! Nonono, that's-- I-I-I guess you _could_ set it to do that, but it's not what it's for! It's for fixing brain damage, and it doesn't kill anybody!" Man-Purse Morty stammers a bit, and then visibly stops, gets a grip on himself, and tries again. This time, there's an odd, unmistakable air of pride when he speaks, one that straightens his shoulders and makes his narrow little chest puff up. "If you set it to scan the maximum reachable number of universes, it's possible to get one, whole, completely healthy brain for one person, while their other selves only get one or two damaged cells each. So, yeah, it's kind of shitty, because you're still dumping garbage in somebody else's head, but it does less damage than one night of binge drinking, so y-y-you're not in any position to judge."

"Well, whatever." Rick takes another swig from his whiskey bottle before he puts it away and flips through the blueprints again.

"Does that mean you're gonna help?"

"You said you just need the actuator, right? You have the rest of the working machine?"

"N-n-not with me, it's at home, but yeah."

Rick meanders over to the shelves and begins digging for parts and tools. "Gimme about half an hoURRr to put it together, then we'll go. Morty, get your shoes on, you're coming too."

"W-wait, what do you mean, "we"? You don't have to-- If you just give me the portal fluid I can--"

"That's my offer, Man-Purse, take it or leave it."

Man-Purse Morty swallows, and then nods. "I'll take it."

 

\--

"So.. uh... Welcome aboard?" Morty leads the way back up to his room, reasonably confident that they won't run into the rest of the family. Summer's in her room, Beth and Jerry are at work and not-work, respectively. "Guess we have a half-hour to kill."

"Yeah." Man-Purse agrees quietly, eyes darting around the house, lingering on the pictures on the walls and the little touches of family life. He waits until Morty closes his door before he says anything else, plopping down on the floor. "...So, you're Morty C-137. It's... it's good to meet you, you have a real reputation on the Citadel."

"Aw, jeez, are you talking about that Good Morty crap?" Morty starts to sit on his bed, then feels weird about it since there's a guest in his room, and elects to join him on the floor, and then feels even weirder about it because this is the first time in his life he's ever had someone his own age hanging out in his room. "Because-- just so you know, that wasn't my idea. I-I didn't start that weird cult, they already had those robes and face paint when I got there."

"Yeah, but... I don't know, they talk about you like you're the real deal." He pauses, not quite sure if he should even be asking, but presses on anyway: "A-are you? The One True Morty?"

"There's no such thing, or if there is, nobody told me. I let them think so because it got them all riled up, and I'm not trying to dump on anybody's beliefs or anything, but.. it's just not.. i-it doesn't math out, you know? The whole point is that we're all Morty, we're all true."

"Yeah. I always thought those weird priest-Mortys were creeps, I'm-- it's good that you're not into it. You know those guys kiss their toes a-a-as part of their religion? It's fucking weird." Man-Purse fidgets nervously with the laces on his boot, glancing nervously at the alarm clock over his counterpart's shoulder. "Still. It's ... kinda cool. I got to a hear a lot of stories from the Mortys you rescued, lots of the ones who stayed are doing a lot better now. Y-you're kind of a hero there."

"Really?" Morty smiles, and notes a bittersweet, twisting reaction in the back of his mind: underneath the cynicism of Rick's voice in his head saying "heroes are bullshit", and the memory of Vance Maximus' lower half dangling from a gore-spewing vent in an alien ceiling, the word itself still means something good and positive. Hero. How about that. "I didn't even really rescue them, I just got them to stop freaking out."

"Really. They all talked about how inspirational and brave you are, so.. yeah, I guess it's a little weird, but you kinda saved my ass just now, too, so I see where they're-- why they say that."

With that, comes a weirdly companionable silence. There are questions, sure, but the ones that come to mind are pointless. What's your Jessica like? What's your family like? Why can't your Rick fix his own machine? Morty filters through his options like a rhetorical rolodex for a little while before his other self interrupts.

"...Can I ask you something?"

It's awkward on a level that isn't quite the same as regular Morty Smith Insecurity, less uncertainty and more afraid of being rude. It's been so long since that kind of politeness has passed through the Smith house, Morty almost doesn't recognize it. "Sure."

"How the _fuck_ do you put up with your Rick!? I-I-I talked to him for not even five whole minutes and I didn't know who I wanted to strangle, him or me!"

"That's Rick C-137 for you." Morty laughs, partly for amusement and partly for the feeling of validation, but it fades quickly. _How the fuck **do** I put up with him?_ "He's seen so much stuff in the multiverse that nothing matters and nothing is special anymore, and it's just a sad way to live. Add that to him being just sort of naturally selfish and arrogant, and it-- i-i-it makes a bad mix, you know? Mostly, I just do my best not to judge him too hard for things he does out of pain, and remember the good times we have when things get bad, and forgive him for it when I know he literally doesn't know any better. It's probably not healthy, but... Y-you know. He's my Rick, I'm his Morty, so I stick by him. You get that, right?"

"Yeah, I do. I totally get it. I... don't take this the wrong way, I-I'm not trying to suck up to you or anything, but this has been a long, shitty week for me and you're... I'm glad you're you. I'm glad everything-- well, not everything, but all the important stuff they said about you was true." Man-Purse Morty skirts a look at the clock again. "I'm sorry I crashed your place, though."

"Don't worry about it. Who can I count on if I can't count on me?" Morty watches his counterpart's fingers twist in his bootlaces. A nervous tic, maybe. "So.. uh. Is it-- I don't know anything about how manners work between Mortys-- Is it rude if I ask you what happened to your Rick? And I don't want to call you Man-Purse, what dimension are you from?"

"L-58 Sigma 12. And I... I don't know what happened to him. I know where he is, or at least what direction he's in, but last weekend, he went back to the Citadel to get some stuff from his old apartment. I started getting worried when he wasn't back by Sunday night, but on Monday morning I started getting signals that he's in pain, and his phone goes straight to voicemail." His voice shakes, and his fingers tighten around the bootlaces in his grip until his knuckles go white. "Something's wrong. He's hurt, and he can't get away or make it stop."

"Signals? If he's able to send out a-- a beacon, or something, doesn't that mean he's got at least a little freedom?"

"M-maybe?" Sigma goes back to fidgeting, and Morty gets the distinct impression he knows more than he's saying. "But the signals haven't changed since they started, and if he had moved or stopped being in pain, they would have changed."

"I don't mean to get dark here, but if they haven't changed, then, doesn't that mean that he's--"

"He's not dead."

"How can you be sure? I-I'm not trying to rain on your parade or anything, but if we're gonna help you with this, it's important to know if--"

"If he was dead, I would know, and I wouldn't even be sitting here."

Morty starts to argue, wants to ask how he knows, but it makes him remember that awful cellar full of Mortys, shivering and whimpering in fear: the words 'poor little Rickless bastards' echo in his memory. Hope counts for a lot. "O-oh. Okay, then. Um. Maybe now's not a good time, but do y--"

"Morty!" Summer's voice interrupts from the hall as she knocks. "Are you coming or what? If we don't leave now, we're gonna miss the bus."

"Oh, crap, I forgot all about it! Sorry, Summer, I can't." He hops up to open the door. It's not officially a rule, but it's generally agreed that even if he answers the knock, it doesn't necessarily mean the fourteen-year-old getting keelhauled by puberty on the other side of the door is decent enough to just walk in. The rest of the family seemed to need to learn that lesson the hard way, but Summer didn't need to be told. "Rick and I are gonna help this other Morty with a thing in his dimension, I gotta pass."

"Other Morty? Wh-- oh. Hi, other-Morty. You look pretty normal, good job." Summer peers over her brother's shoulder to see another one of him, sitting on the floor. She tosses him a little wave, then focuses on the one of her brothers that she actually lives with. "Okay. Mom texted me, she says that pre-order you had at Gamestop is in, you want me to grab it while I'm there?"

"If you don't mind, thanks. Don't forget the bonus stuff though, it comes with an art book."

"Sure-- uh. What's with him?"

Sigma practically jumps a mile when he realizes Summer's looking at him again, dinner-plate eyes brimming. "S-sorry, I didn't-- I-- I'm sorry. I didn't mean to mess up your plans."

"It's really not that big a deal, don't worry about it. See you later, Morty. Uh, Mortys." Summer disappears back down the hallway.

Morty shuts the door behind her, and waits until he hears the front door open and shut before he says anything. "Did something happen to your Summer?"

Sigma shrugs, and his voice shakes a little when he tries to talk through the lump in his throat. "Yeah. But it's whatever-- there's infinite Summers, so wh-who cares, y'know? I just saw her. She's fine." As attempts to play it cool go, it could be better.

Morty elects to let him have that one, nodding casually; don't even trip, dawg. "Yeah. But, you know, if you and your Rick don't like the Citadel either, m-m-maybe once this is over, we can all hang out together? She goes on adventures with us sometimes, a-a-and if your Rick lets you use his portal gun it would basically be like we're neighbors. U-unless that's weird, do Mortys hang out?"

"I'd like that." Sigma smiles a watery, grateful little smile, happy to take the change of subject. "And yeah, they do. They don't really have a whole lot of options for friends, y'know? Most Mortys don't hang out with Ricks who aren't theirs, unless that's their job or something."

"The Citadel has professional Mortys?"

He laughs. "Not like you're probably thinking, no, but lots of Mortys work at places for Ricks. Like me, I used to be a bartender at the Mortimer Lounge. If you work anywhere that serves alcohol, y-y-you're pretty much guaranteed to spend a lot of time with other Ricks."

"Mortim-- Wh-what the hell is the _Mortimer Lounge_? That's fucking creepy!"

"No way, the Mortimer Lounge is a nice place. Y-you wanna see creepy, check out Mr. Smith's Slippery Rides, or The Jessica Parlor. Those places are just gross." Sigma shudders.

"What's wrong with the Jessica Parlor?" In his head, it's a fancy room full of couches upholstered in the same pretty lavender fabric of her favorite blouse, with fancy portraits of her in gilded frames on the walls and Jessica-themed drinks and snacks served by robot-Jessica waitresses. "That-- that sounds like a place I'd want-- the place to be, the Jessica Parlor."

"Uh... no. It's.. um. It's a place where you can watch Mortys masturbate to stuff. That's sort of the gimmick, you pay fifty bucks, pick out a random thing from their prop gallery to be "Jessica", they put a red wig on it, and then one of the Mortys takes it into a booth with a two-way mirror and you watch him jerk off."

Morty's mental image of purple sofa heaven rots away immediately, replaced by the image of a particular curvy piece of driftwood in a red wig. "Th-that's disgusting! Why the Hell would-- people pay money for that? Do _Ricks_ pay money for that!?"

"Y-yeah." Sigma looks a little sickened himself. "It's not like it's a-- it's not like a Starbucks, y'know, you only find shit like that in the really bad parts of Mortytown, or the south side of Sanchez Village-- dregs-of-society-type parts of the Citadel. The guys who go to places like that are usually pretty messed up. I-I-I mean, the Citadel kind of sucks in general, and any problem you have-- it'll.. it gets a hundred times worse just by being there, but when Ricks and Mortys start doing sick shit in a place that doesn't judge because they're all literally the same person, it gets real bad, real fast."

Morty frowns. The first images that come to mind are ugly: a big, encapsulated city-state where the concept of public indecency doesn't exist, there's no legal drinking age, and there's no reason to hide or question or resist urges that would warrant shame in the real world. Maybe Rick's reasons for hating the Citadel aren't just about individuality after all. "So... what kind of place is the Mortimer Lounge, if it's not gross?"

"It's sort of a piano bar for Mortyless Ricks. Mortys and Ricks die in adventures all the time, but when a Morty dies of something stupid and normal, like a car accident or a school shooting or something, most Ricks feel like it's their fault, even if it wasn't." Sigma settles back on his hands. "You go there, listen to some music, and a Morty brings you drinks and snacks, and he'll sit with you and talk if you want, and just.. be there, for a little while."

"It's not-- so it's not gross, but isn't that still creepy?" Morty frowns. "Being a temporary replacement Morty so Ricks can-- I don't know, be in denial more comfortably while they wait to get a new Morty, l-like the first one didn't even exist?"

"Depends how you look at it." Sigma half shrugs, and gestures lightly to his other self, sitting across from him. "S-say you died suddenly, like-- like one day, you went to school, a-and on the way home, the bus crashes, and you die. What's the first thing your Rick would do?"

"Get another Morty, because he needs his human cloaking device, and there's so many of us that are so alike it won't make any difference." Morty murmurs. He hates thinking about it. All he can hear is Rick's voice saying "this isn't special", as if the very idea that anything could be valued for being itself is a gimmick that advertising agencies use to sell garbage to idiots and children, and he's both of those things wrapped in a dumb yellow T-shirt.

"He'll get mad at whoever stopped him from taking you on an adventure instead of letting you go to school in the first place, and the only thing he'll admit could have stopped him is himself. I've seen it a million times." Sigma explains, solemn, but sincere.  "He'll get drunk, a-and pretend he's fine, and remind himself he can just get a new one, like it's not a big deal. Then he'll hate himself, because no matter how irrational it is, he doesn't _want_ a new one, the Morty he wants is the one that just died in a bus crash. It's like that with all of them, even if they don't want to admit it, it's part of what makes Rick... Rick.

That's what it's for: a Rick comes in, sits down for some Scotch and cookies, and a Morty comes and sits down with him. The Rick feels a little better just because he's not alone, and the Morty feels good for helping out the Morty who died. It's like, don't even trip, dawg; your Rick misses you, but it's okay because I'm-- I got him. I'm here."

"...My Rick's not like other Ricks, though. I mean-- yeah, it's good to hear that some of them feel that way-- I mean I'm not glad to hear their Mortys died but-- y-y-you know what I mean. But my Rick doesn't... He wouldn't feel that way."

Sigma shakes his head. "Even C-137. Most of them don't say it out loud, but you can tell. They like to talk about how they're above that kind of thing, or they're a god, or wh-whatever, but they grieve just like anybody else."

"But it's not like anybody else. They keep us around for our stupid brain waves, it's not..." He blinks, pauses, and it dawns on him all at once that Ricks didn't always have Mortys because Mortys didn't always exist. If Rick had been going on adventures into the multiverse since his mom was a little girl, that left a huge window of time before he'd even be born, let alone be old enough to be going with him. Twenty years? Maybe more?

And ever since Rick started bringing him along on his adventures, they've been all but inseparable. The more he thinks about it, being separated from each other is practically a guaranteed disaster. For Rick C-137 personally, it meant getting captured, strapped to a table, and nearly murdered. It meant facing oblivion, alone, in a void outside of time. It meant being trapped in an alien simulation so lifelike that he couldn't trust the real world when he escaped.

What if those things had happened, and Rick hadn't had a Morty at all? How many things had Rick lived through that would have been easier, or safer, or just more fun if he'd been there?

He realizes he's been silent too long when Sigma continues, making a clear effort to be encouraging. "He'd replace you, but he'd still mourn you, and-- y'know, just from experience, it's the ones who pretend they're okay the hardest that hurt the most. S-so don't feel bad, okay?"

"Yeah." Morty smiles, more for his counterpart's benefit than out of genuine feeling. "M-maybe you're right. I'll... I'll try to keep that in mind from now on. Thanks."

"No problem. You think w--"

The door bursts open, this time with Rick on the other side. Rick doesn't give a shit what Morty's doing on the other side of his bedroom door, puberty be damned. "All right, it's doURRRne. C'mon, Mortys." He tosses the finished actuator into Sigma's lap, a metal-and-plastic cylinder covered in a lattice of small, delicate-looking parts and spraying enough copper wiring to make it look like it has hair. "Stow that in your man-purse and let's get this over with."

"Great! Thank you!" Sigma ignores the insult and carefully puts the actuator in his duffle bag, settling it snugly between what looks like a backup lab coat and a sweater that Morty remembers getting for his tenth birthday. Once it's secured, he stands up. "I really appreciate it, C-137."

Rick hands back the portal gun; Morty notes that although Rick said he'd only give him enough for a one-way trip to the Citadel, the one he hands back to Sigma is completely full. "Yeah, I doubt it."

Sigma gives him a flat look and fires it at the floor, and the familiar yellow-green pool of goopy spacetime anomaly blooms in Morty's bedroom carpet. "Let me put the machine together, then we'll take the ship. C'mon."

He hops into the portal and disappears; Rick and Morty follow suit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel guilty for working on this instead of all the other fics I ought to be working on, but my passions are few and far between these days, and this fandom doesn't have the same baggage that my other ones do. If you're reading this because you read any of my other works, you have my sincere apologies, and my gratitude. I'm going to try not to disappoint anyone, but for now I just want to write something without having to dig through pain and sadness to get to where the words are. I'm hoping this will help. orz 
> 
> I'm also writing this partly as an exercise in world-building, which I don't get to do very often. If you have opinions on what you like to read for stuff like that, like dialogue or narrative or supplemental material, (this fic involves a universe with soulmate-identifying marks, but I have more lore on the concept than I can comfortably work into the actual text and I'm still figuring out how I want to do that, if I ever get there) I'd love to hear them.


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The portal to Earth Dimension L-58 Sigma 12 opens on the ceiling of the Smith family living room. It's almost pitch dark as Rick and two Mortys hit the floor; the only light in the room is being cast from the portal itself. It turns the sight of something familiar and comforting into an unsettling shadow of home, cast in deep, black shadows and edged in bright, electric green.

"S-s-sorry about the mess!" Sigma says, and hits the light switch as he hurries out of the room and towards the garage. "Gimme-- gimme just a few minutes, um-- make yourself, yourselves, at home. Y'know, cause you are, technically. There's sodas in the fridge!"

He's already gone by the time Morty's eyes have adjusted to the sudden brightness, so there's no one to answer him when he asks, "W-wait, why are the blast shields up?"

Rick shrugs and makes his way to the kitchen, apparently choosing to ignore the dense steel plating covering the sliding door to the backyard. "Doesn't matter, we're not staying."

Morty follows along after him, but his focus is on the differences between his own home and this one. Mostly, it's little things; the walls are painted a different color, the potted plants are in different spots, the furniture is arranged a different way. It's neat, but unimportant, until he notices the pictures on the walls.

They're all of the family, and there are lots of them. Most of the ones at his own house are generic wall art, plain to the point that Morty doesn't even remember what the pictures actually look like. The ones he sees now are lovingly framed print-outs of pictures taken with somebody's phone: a bunch of Summer's selfies, Jerry sleeping in his armchair with a dick drawn on his face in marker, Beth raising a glass of wine at some kind of dinner party, Rick lazily strumming a guitar, but none of Morty himself, suggesting that he'd been the one taking them. He counts twenty of them in the living room alone.

When he gets there, Rick is already in the kitchen and helping himself to the cabinets. "All right, Eyeholes! Want one, Morty? Y-y-you might wanna take advantage of the opportunity, Morty. With the blast shields up, the Eyehole Man can't bust in here and fuck you up for eating one." He pops one in his mouth and offers the box.

"N-no, that's okay. Thanks, though." Morty leans against the counter, watching Rick's eyes glaze over with the bliss of a consequence-free cereal snack. "Um... Rick? Why did you make him bring us along for this? Didn't you just want him to go away?"

Rick swallows and puts the box away, then heads for the fridge. "The brain-recompiler. I came up with something like that on paper a long time ago, but writing the program to automatically open a hundred billion micropoURRtals the size of a brain cell, i-i-it's not difficult but it's-- it's fucking boring, Morty, it takes forever, it's--- it's just a huge waste of time. And it's not even really necessary, you-you'd get practically the same results using a cloned brain, and that only takes a few hours."

"It'd be even better, for a damaged brain, right? It's a cloned brain, doesn't that make it.. y'know, a fresh one? If you can just back up all the person's memories anyway, there's not really any point to-- to cobbling a new brain out of old brain parts. Just clone a new one and put the memories in there." Morty hops up to sit on the countertop, something his mother would never let him do. "And how do you even know what you're getting? Wh-what if you got a perfect brain cell but it was for-- for a fish version of you, or a version of you that has a brain made of... of milk duds, or something, you know? Good job, now you're part milk dud, hope it didn't replace th-the the part of your brain that controls knowing how to tie your shoes."

"See, exactly, you almost get it. This is why you get to be Morty, and he gets to be Man-Purse. His Rick is probably a moron." Rick takes a can of blorange soda out of the fridge, cracks it, and goes looking in the cabinets for something to put in it; Morty tries not to glow a little at the implied not-quite-a-compliment. "And if it works, what am I supposed to do? I-I-I can't just sit around waiting for some other asshole to steal my brain one piece at a time. You remember what happened the last time another Rick had the bright idea to get the contents out of other Ricks' heads?"

Morty frowns, reminded of that scarred-up Rick and a dome of tortured Mortys for the second time in the past hour and not liking it one bit. He distracts himself looking at a picture on the fridge: a yearbook photo of Summer in an elegant black dress, holding a flute. "If that's what you were worried about, why did you even build it?"

"I wasn't _going to_ until you showed up."

"That was before you even saw the blueprints! If you had a real reason to turn him down, that's different."

"For fuck's sake, Morty! You got your way, didn't you? Quit your bitching." Rick checks for one of Beth's stashes of pinot noir under the kitchen sink, but the closest thing he finds is a bottle of drain cleaner, which isn't an option, even for him.  
He almost resigns himself to just drinking plain soda before he remembers the wafer cookie vodka in his pocket. He doesn't know what the fuck a "blorange" is supposed to be, but maybe he'll get lucky, and mixing it with the vanilla flavoring in the booze will add up to something like a creamsicle cocktail. Rick pops the bottle open and pours about a half-shot of vodka into the soda can, just as a taste test, and he's rewarded instantly with a perfect, fizzy-sugar-pink puff of foam that smells exactly like his favorite treat, mixed with something refreshing and citrusy. Wafer cookie vodka might be a shitty idea, but at least it's top-shelf shit. "And a-a-anyway flurbos are flurbos, plus the Blips and Chitz tickets. Fifteen thouUURRpsand's a lot, Morty, with the stash we have at the house, we've got almost enough for an anti-gravity dirtbike. Y-y-you don't even need a license for one of those, Morty, you roll up to school on one of those and you'll be getting double-fistfuls of other people's puberty for a week."

On reflex, Morty wants to object, to complain that it's kind of fucked up to screw a kid out of his money and hard-won arcade prizes for twenty minutes of tinkering (and "double-fistfuls of puberty" is a strong contender for the Grossest Thing He's Ever Heard a Grown Man Say Award), but Rick's got a point: Morty _had_ gotten his way with almost no pushback at all, at least by Rick's standards. And the dirtbike does sound pretty cool.

"You know what, Rick? You're right. I wanted you to help him, a-a-and you didn't have to, but you did. If you really put aside your concerns to do that, then I shouldn't complain. I'm sorry." He opens the fridge to get a soda for himself, and maybe to shield himself from the sarcastic, mean response he expects. That's usually what he gets. "Thank you."

What he gets instead is an unfamiliar gentleness, barely more than a whisper, despite Rick's whiskey-roughened voice. "You're welcome."

Morty shuts the fridge, looking over at his grandfather like he's grown a second head. Leaving aside the part where Rick _never_ accepts gratitude or apologies gracefully, Rick sounded almost confused, bewildered, as if the simple words had landed in a part of his heart that he'd assumed stopped beating ages ago.

Which is _horseshit_.

Morty immediately assumes that means something's wrong-- a simulation, a bad reaction to alien drinks, portals opening in his brain, _something_ \-- and takes a hesitant step towards his grandpa. "Rick? Are you okay?"

It snaps away so fast that later Morty won't even be sure he saw anything at all, but in that split second he could swear he saw a genuine _smile_ on Rick's face, warm and loving and open, without any trace of manic excitement or smug satisfaction.

Then it's gone; Rick shakes his head like a dog trying to get water off of its fur and outright scowls as he dumps the contents of his soda can into the sink. He crushes the can against the countertop, crams it into the garbage disposal, and slaps the power switch. Little bits of aluminum and stray drops of blorange soda fly out of the drain with an ear-splitting grinding noise as the disposal struggles to chew through the metal, and Rick doesn't turn it off until several seconds after it's finished.

He opens his mouth to ask, but at the first sound of his voice, Rick silently snaps his attention to his grandson. He says nothing, but the message is clear: _You got something to say, you little shit? I fucking **dare you**._

Morty says nothing. He just puts his drink back in the fridge, and quietly leaves the room.

\--  
With Rick fuming over something in the kitchen and his other-self putting a machine together in the garage, Morty wanders upstairs.

The hallway looks more or less the same, but there's something vaguely unsettling about it, even when he turns the lights on. No pictures on the wall, but the bedroom doors are all but papered in printed cell phone photos of their respective owners, and the only door that's actually open is his own.

He feels weird when he approaches Summer's door, partly because covering her door with pictures of her and her friends seems like something a stalker would do and partly because going into Summer's room instantly triggers the memory of being kicked in the nads, but he knocks anyway, and lets himself in when no one answers.

it looks more or less how he expects, the same walls and carpet and pretty purple comforter on her bed that once gave him a boner because it reminded him of Jessica's skirt, left in the kind of mild disarray that's typical of her morning routine: wardrobe half-open from rummaging in it for an outfit, bed unmade from rolling over and hitting the snooze button, makeup left sitting on her vanity table. This Summer apparently hadn't quit music, though, judging by the framed picture of Nancy on her bedside table and the music stand sitting in the corner; it still has an open book of sheet music in it.

Morty takes half a step into the room and sneezes hard, blowing a cloud of dust into his own face and making him sneeze and cough; it takes him a minute to get enough air into his lungs to stop. With the blast shields up it's hard to see it, but when Morty reaches over to turn the lights on, it's obvious that the room hadn't been touched in at least a year, probably even longer. Everything is covered in a thick layer of dust and the air in the room is dry and stale, even the makeup on the vanity is clearly expired. The little pot of gel eyeliner left sitting open in front of the mirror is dry and crumbly, the lipstick next to it left to rot into a vague, brownish mush.

The word comes to mind almost immediately: _enshrined_. Summer L-58 Sigma 12 was dead. Probably for a while, too; in his own dimension, Summer had quit playing the flute while he was still in middle school.

It makes his heart sink a little in his chest. He's read about people who do stuff like this, sealing up a person's bedroom without touching anything, refusing to clean it or put anything away because it would erase the last traces they left on it, or because touching it would bring back painful memories, or because going through their personal things still feels like a violation of their privacy.

Naturally the guilt sets in instantly, since the entire point of enshrining someone's room after they die is to preserve it and he'd ruined it. He can't even wipe his sneeze-leavings off the vanity without disturbing the dust and makeup; his good judgment gets the better of him, and he ducks to the bathroom to get a towel.

He cringes when he hears steps on the stairs, and then the awkward pause-and-shuffle as they come to the door.

"Morty? The actuator's perfect, as soon as the software's finished loading we can... o-oh." Sigma's voice seems to fall from his throat into his shoes, eyes glazing over as he comes to stand in the doorway.

"I'm really sorry," Morty starts, folding the little worn hand-towel. "I-I didn't mean to mess it up in here, I just sneezed, and--"

Sigma-Morty shakes his head. "N-no, it's fine, it's... I should have told you, but it kinda slipped my mind. Are you okay?"

"Yeah, just... sneezed." He points to the vanity table, makeup moved to its proper spot in the corner and the tabletop wiped clean of dust and snot. "... What happened to her?"

Sigma pauses, trying to decide whether he really wants to tell that story, and ultimately decides it's better to do it now, when they're safe and in private. He reaches into his jacket pocket for his phone. A few tap-and-swipes later, the blast shield over Summer's window rolls upward. "It's not what happened to her. It's what happened to Earth."

For a second or two, Morty thinks it's weird that it's so dark outside even though it's only about three thirty in the afternoon, then he realizes: that's not the night sky, that's _outer space_.

He rushes to the window and sees the now-familiar ocean of darkness and stars, interrupted by huge, floating chunks of rock and the chilling debris of his very own neighborhood: cars that he recognized from people on his block, houses from down the street, part of a wooden fence from the other side of his own yard. His heart almost drops into his shoes when he recognizes the shattered dark red sedan that Jessica's parents drive, the front end crushed like tin foil and the broken rear axel trailing along behind it like a tail, and he turns around before he can identify the lifeless silhouette sitting in the backseat.

"D-did-- Did a Rick do this?" Morty asks. He hates that it's the first question that comes to mind, he hates that he asked, he hates that he thinks he knows the answer.

"No. The Galactic Federation did." Sigma gently guides his counterpart back into the hallway, they both pretend that Morty's sigh of relief didn't shake as much as it did. "A Gromflomite smuggler crashed his ship in Georgia, and this huge thermonuclear lance thing he was selling to this Flobonkulon rebel army went off on impact. It broke Florida off into the ocean and made this really deep crater, it went almost to the actual center of the Earth.

The Flobonkulons already had their guys on Earth, and the Federation couldn't beat them to the crash site and they didn't want to risk anybody getting away with a planet-drilling laser, so they decided to launch a nuke into the Earth's core from orbit -- you know, since the hole was already there. Earth's not part of the Federation, so they didn't have to evacuate anybody, they're just "legally obligated" to send a worldwide warning. Which they did, b-but they didn't want the Flobonkulons to know, so they sent it on a frequency that Earth tech doesn't use. That way they weren't technically committing a war crime."

Sigma takes his phone and closes the blast shields again; the chilling darkness is more comforting than it was, even though it's not any brighter outside. "The only person who heard it was Mom, because she was watching Interdimensional Cable. Rick went to go intercept the Flobonkulons without me, she went to go pick up Dad and Summer and told me to wait here in case they came back on their own... a-a-nd then the world kind of... blew up. The shielding on the house worked just fine, and the artificial atmospherics kicked in, so I was okay, but..."

Morty lets himself fall back against the wall next to Summer's door, watches Sigma close it. The images that roll through his mind are gruesome, not just because of the subject matter, but because his experience with the Federation has been so... tame, in comparison. Living under their rule hadn't been fun, but it was peaceful and orderly and, apart from his family situation and the incident with Summer and the portal gun, hadn't been all that different. Fighting them isn't fun either, but the Federation and Rick are enemies, so it's not like he can rightfully blame them for that.

Still, there's something especially sick about the idea of a government that has a legal procedure for destroying inhabited planets, and loopholes to get around it, to avoid committing a crime against the six billion sapient life forms that they had already killed. Bureaucrats, in-goddamn-deed. "So... that's why you and your Rick went to the Citadel?"

"Nnnot exactly?" Sigma nods to the little spare room that Rick had taken when he came to the Smith house; that one has pictures plastered all over the door, too. The Rick in those photos has a somewhat jittery, over-caffeinated look about him, hair touseled like he had just raked his fingers through it. In most of them, he's holding a mug of coffee; in all of them, he has a cigarette in his mouth, and he seems pudgier. "My original Rick had kind of a paranoid streak, he spent more time preparing for adventures than actually going, he was bad at m-- a-at improvising and he knew it, so he just tried to be ready-- "for all eventualities", he would say. That's why he didn't take me with him when h.. a-at the end."

"... Because you were supposed to be his backup." It's not a question. Sigma-Rick wouldn't need to hide from the Federation because it was already too far away to catch him, and Sigma-Morty apparently knew how to operate his tech. The boots and the duffle bag made more sense, knowing they belonged to a Morty whose Rick raised him to be prepared for anything.

Sigma stares a bit into the distance, trying not to think too hard about it. "He was supposed to signal me if he needed me to pull him out, but if he sent it, I never got it. A few days later, the ship came back to the house on auto-pilot with a puddle of liquified Rick in the driver's seat. I.. don't really know what happened, but I... I guess it happened too fast for him to call me. Or maybe he didn't want to put me in danger.. I'll never know, I guess."

"Jesus Christ. I feel like I owe Rick an apology for complaining about all the crap he pulls with the Gromflomites now... holy shit. A-are... um. Is it a dumb question if I ask if you're okay?"

"Yeah, but it's a good kind of dumb." He laughs, and awkwardly pats Morty's shoulder. "And I'm all right now. After I got assigned to my new Rick and we bailed on the Citadel, we came back here to hide, and it turned out to be kinda perfect. I don't think I could be happier if I tried."

"R-really?" Morty stares. "I-- I'm not trying to dump on your choices or anything, Morty, and I really, _really_ mean n-no offense, but...I-I don't know, it just seems like being stuck on a rock with no one but Rick, forever, being a replacement Morty but not getting a replacement family...? Are you _sure_ you're okay? And your new Rick didn't.. um. Do something to your brain or something?"

Sigma nods with a half-smile of pleasant surprise. "Wow. You're really earning that One True Morty thing, huh? I promise I'm fine. It's not perfect, there's a lot of stuff I miss and... I have kind of a hard time keeping it together when we go to other dimensions and run into people that I used to know, but it's okay, because I have this."

He pushes up the sleeve of his windbreaker and proudly displays the tattoo that Morty had caught a glimpse of earlier. It's an abstract geometric design, with weird, bullethole-like circles connected by tiny parallel lines that might be music staffs or circuits, all done in rich, bright, electric blue that seems to make his unmarked skin greyish and dingy in comparison.

"Whoa, cool," Morty praises. "But.. uh. What? I-I mean it's a really great tattoo, but... what's so great about it that it makes all... all _this_ okay to you? What does it mean?"

"Oh. Do they not have percarus marks in your dimension?" Sigma asks. "This one's for my Rick, and he's got one of his own, for me. It means we're soulmates."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Morty somehow manages to dig himself out from under the avalanche of questions in his head, most of which are _what the fuck_ , long enough to mutter an, "Oh. Okay," and hopes that the dead-eyed confusion can pass itself off as being totally okay with the creeping implications that Morty is staunchly refusing to let his brain linger on. The word "soulmates" itself is probably more profane than any swear Rick's ever said, if only because it definitely implies that souls exist and explicitly calls them _mates_. Part of him wants to ask if it means the same thing in this dimension that it does in his own, but he's afraid of the answer. 

"That's okay, most universes don't. I can give you some research material on it, if you want... is that weird? You're looking at me like it's weird." 

"Nnnthat's okay, thanks, no. It's super fucking weird, but h-hey, y'know, if you're happy and he's happy, then, y'know, I-I didn't come here to judge. Um. Did you say you were ready to leave soon?"

"Yeah." Sigma straightens up and rolls his sleeve back down, lightly rubbing the mark with his thumb as if it aches. "The software on the recompiler is loading, we should get packed."

"Oh. Um, I don't really carry stuff with me for adventures, usually. Rick's got that kind of thing under control." Morty shrugs. 

"You sure about that? I-I'm not trying to talk shit about your Rick or anything, but.. you've really never been on an adventure and wished you had a weapon?" Sigma asks. He doesn't have to say 'Rick C-137 is nuts' out loud. "If you really feel that way, I guess I can't force you, but maybe you should come see the gun rack anyway, see if there's something you like?"

"The one in the garage?"

"No, the one in my room. C'mon." 

He trots off down the hallway toward his own bedroom; it's pretty wildly different from the one in his own dimension. His bed is bigger and the walls are full of maps and charts instead of posters, and his bookshelf is packed fit to burst with books and binders. The shelves around his bed are full of toys that Morty-Sigma clearly considers special: one shelf is nothing but well-loved, outgrown toys that Morty recognizes from his own childhood, another is packed with high-quality figures and statuettes of sexy female video game characters. One shelf, this one with a protective clear-plastic cover over it, has only two items: the model Titanic that, in his own dimension, occupies the special cabinet in the garage where Jerry hides his precious keepsakes, and a cut-crystal horse figurine that he'd given to Beth for her birthday. 

The first thought to cross Morty's mind is that Beth and Jerry of L-58 Sigma 12 must have died before they had a chance to hate each other. 

Sigma opens the standing wardrobe that stands where Morty's dresser ought to be, displaying hooks and racks and shelves of _stuff_ , weapons and tools and ammunition and stuff Morty doesn't even recognize. Some of it's obvious, a couple of sci-fi looking pistols, a laser carbine rifle with a shortened stock (for Morty-sized arms, presumably), a box of flashbangs, but the rest looks more like random junk, though he does recognize a Meeseeks box amid the miscellanaea. 

"Wow... your Rick just lets you keep this stuff in your room?"

"Yours doesn't?" Sigma reaches up to the top shelf for a sandwich bag full of gelcaps. "Jeez, Morty, didn't you ever learn how to fight?"

"Well, yeah, but not because I ever-- y'know, sat down to learn, I just had to pick it up on the fly. That's how it usually goes, my Rick doesn't really teach me stuff intentionally." Morty looks over the cabinet, feeling a little more insecure with every passing second. "But we don't usually get involved in anything you could call combat, unless 'fighting retreat' counts, I guess.. usually we're just running like hell."

"I guess that makes sense, but.. still, I'm impressed, if you've lived this long while unarmed. You must be crazy lucky." Sigma takes two of the gelcaps out of the baggie, sticks one in his pocket and offers the other to Morty before he puts the rest away. "You're gonna want one of these, just in case."

Morty holds it up to the light to get a better look at it; it's slightly squishy and translucent, filled with a bright, sinister red fluid of some kind. He tries not to think anything cynical about his luck, while he's at it. "Whoa... what's this?"

"Homemade Berserker drops. One part cocaine, one part tramadol, one part rykranolide, three parts concentrated purginol. Y-you ever been in a situation where you're backed into a corner, and all of a sudden you flip out and get really, really violent?"

The room disappears, replaced with the walls of a foetid tavern bathroom stall, and Morty feels the slime of a lewd tongue smearing his cheek; he reaches up sharply to wipe it off and finds it dry. He blinks, and he's back in his own-- no, another version of his own room-- again. "...Y-yeah," he says. "I've had purginol before." 

If he notices, SIgma pretends not to. "Good! Then you'll know what to expect. It's a _lot_ stronger than the food-additive kind, though, so be careful."

"What's the rest of the stuff in it for?" He puts the gelcap away in his front pocket, careful not to drop it. 

"Time-dilation formula, basically, that way it hits your brain almost instantly, and afterward you can't feel pain. I-it only lasts a couple of minutes, though, that's why it's for emergencies only. Once you come down you're gonna be really, really tired, and probably really thirsty, so be ready."

"Got it." 

"Okay." Sigma takes his duffle-bag off of his back and begins properly packing for the trip, removing some of the more mundane stuff to make room for the arsenal. "I'm bringing the stuff I usually do, but if you're not good with weapons, bring tools. My backpack's hanging on the doorknob, so if--" 

He stops mid-sentence, frowning. "...You don't have to come, if you don't want to. I've been just kind of...a-a-assuming that you'd come along because your Rick brought you, but.. this is probably going to be dangerous, and I have no way to know _how_ dangerous. You shouldn't have to risk your life for somebody else's Rick."

"My Rick's going, so I'm going," Morty says, and retrieves the dusty, worn backpack; it probably hasn't been touched since the Earth blew up and school stopped being a thing. "I-I mean, I don't want you to have to deal with my Rick by yourself, a-and maybe _yours_ lets you use the portal gun whenever you want, but mine won't, so if y-you don't come back, them I'm stuck here forever. But more than that, I... I'm not gonna bail on you. My Rick's an asshole, and he's lazy and selfish, and he hates dealing with the Citadel, so once you find your Rick, he'll probably just portal away and leave you and him there to sort it out for yourselves. And if your Rick really is hurt, then you're gonna need me to talk him into helping you again because he doesn't care what happens to his other selves. Especially if he finds out you're.. um. Soulmates."

"Why? What's he got against soulmates?" Sigma's face tenses, not quite sure if he should be offended. On the one hand, it's very personal, on the other, Rick C-137 is a known dick. "I thought you said you don't have them in your universe."

"W-well, we don't have the-- what did you call it? Perco-something marks?-- but we do have people who get matching tattoos because they're in love, and he thinks love is just the animal instinct to breed. That's probably the fastest way to get him to lose interest in helping you, so just.. don't mention it around him, if you can."

"Percarus mark, and it's not a _tattoo_ , they're like birthmarks o-or fingerprints. I already had mine when I was born." 

Morty blinks. "...You were _born_ with it?"

"Yeah. Percarus marks only appear if your soulmate is already alive, so if you have one when you're born, it means your soulmate is older than you. Mine is a Rick, so..." Sigma pushes up his sleeve and traces the circuitry-like pattern on his wrist. On closer inspection, it really doesn't look like a regular tattoo; the bright, electric blue is too opaque, too intense to be ink, the discoloration of the skin is too natural, more like a browned burn scar or a weird, elaborate blue freckle. It's such a warm, tender gesture that Morty actually can't help feeling his heart melt a little just seeing it, like it's something out of one of Summer's chick flicks that he pretends not to like. "Not every universe has the right conditions to support percarus resonance, though. My Rick says it's possible that soulmates exist in every reality, just that they can't manifest marks so they're never aware of each other."

"...That's really.. Uh. It's good that... you have that?" He doesn't want to say it's weird or gross, because if you have literal, written proof on your skin that someone out there is exactly right for you, but you don't get a choice in who that is, then it's not fair to criticize. Morty scratches his shoulder though his sleeve, plagued suddenly by an awkward itching. "But still, maybe don't talk about it around Rick C-137. At best, he'll say something mean about it, at worst, he'll find a way to ruin it for you. He's really, really good at ruining things people like." 

"Right." He looks a little disappointed. "That seems... sad."

"Yeah, it is. Deep down, he's a sad guy." Morty shrugs. "But who knows? Maybe your Rick can explain it to him when they meet. Speaking of which: he's hurt, right? Where do you keep your first aid kits?"

 

\---

Rick paces uncomfortably in the living room until he hears Man-Purse Morty leave the garage. It's not _his_ workshop, technically, but everything he needs should be there, and he doesn't need some cut-rate secondhand Morty asking stupid questions or prying into his business. He has to wait a frustratingly long time; it makes the spot between his shoulderblades itch like hell.

At long last, he hears the familiar squeak of the garage door and the thud of Morty-feet passing through the kitchen away from it; it's not the rubbery patting of sneaker soles, the sound is heavier and duller, but the gait is unmistakable, and Rick scowls at himself for the involuntary reaction. _That's Morty!_ , says some idiotic delight in the back of his brain. He wishes he could kick that fucker down the stairs to shut him up, because that _isn't_ his Morty, _his_ Morty, clearly the superior of the two, is upstairs in Summer's room. 

He lets himself into the garage and is briefly surprised. The workbench is there, along with the same shelves full of Rick Stuff along the wall, and an open hatch in the floor leading to the underground portion, but there's one major change. Most of the room is taken up by well-loved musical instruments, including a seven-piece drum set and a heavily-and-expertly modified Telecaster; for a split second Rick's stomach lurches at the thought of this universe being one where the Flesh Curtains never retired, but none of the instruments have their logo on them, and the drums aren't sized for Squanchy. He lets it go, and heads for the sub-basement.

The recompiler is hard to miss, it's a chair-like apparatus sitting up against the far wall. The actuator has been installed successfully (which, he reminds himself, is not a complicated task, and he shouldn't be impressed), and the laptop hooked up to the microportal array seems to be uploading the program that actually controls it. 

Rick's goal in coming to this dimension was to make sure that Man-Purse Morty didn't eventually bring a shitshow to his doorstep, firstly by hiding a wireless data storage device in the actuator (which contains a nice patch for the recompiler's software that will automatically define "Dimension C-137" as "whatever dimension(s) Rick C-137 and Morty C-137 are in at the moment" and then exclude that dimension from its scan), and secondly by not throwing a Morty into the ether with a full portal gun. He didn't especially give a shit what happened to Man-Purse Rick, and once the installation was complete and he could be assured that he wouldn't have all his synapses split in half by portals opening in his brain or suddenly come down with a bad case of tertiary syphilis at the breakfast table, he'd planned to go back home and never bother with this dump again.

But that was before he'd ingested a mind control drug disguised as flavored vodka. 

That's the only explanation for his reaction. It was barely a two-second pour, and even diluted with a soft drink, it hit him like a freight train. He'd rather not think about what would have happened if he'd had the full, straight shot, let alone if he'd chugged the bottle.

It didn't suddenly alter his brain chemistry to suddenly produce the emotional high of infatuation; Rick would have recognized it for what it was and wrote it off as a stupid oxytocin cocktail. Maybe creepy and weird for a Morty to be handing out as a birthday gift, but it's not like he'd have the high road on that one. 

No, it had been a sudden, fleeting burst of love and affection directed _at himself_ , intense and pure. It had been the terrifyingly precise feeling of being in completely in love-- of knowing his every shame and secret and forgiving him, of knowing his every flaw and quirk and accepting him, of knowing to the very depths of yourself that you always have been, and will always be, passionately, joyously in love-- with Rick Sanchez. 

Meanwhile, Rick C-137 holds no illusions about the biochemical nature of human emotion and the tendency of relationships to collapse on themselves, but he definitely knows what kind of leverage can be gained by those feelings. He might not have a lot of moral hangups or much concern for ethics, but bottling an intense, passionate love for a Rick has a lot of very creepy, very dangerous possible uses that could mean a lot of very creepy, very dangerous backlash for Rick-kind in general. Of course, it could just be stupid sentimentality, Man-Purse Morty's idea of an anti-depressant that could cure Man-Purse Rick of his intense self-loathing, but that still didn't explain how he got the stuff in the first place. If Man-Purse Morty knew a Rick who'd be willing to bottle _those_ feelings for him, he wouldn't have had to come to Rick C-137 for help in the first place.

Whatever the answer is, it ought to be here.

He grabs the laptop and makes sure the software keeps doing its thing before he starts digging; if he's right-- and of course he is-- then a Rick who lets his Morty have unsupervised access to a portal gun should also have his own subether phone, which means everything he does on it should be recorded.

It takes a few minutes of searching through the house system-- easier than he expected, because Man-Purse Rick is apparently the boring kind that uses real file names for things-- before Rick finds what he wants. After that, it's his most-and-least favorite game of "Guess Another Rick's Passwords". 

Man-Purse Rick turns out to be an unusually worthy adversary until Rick makes an educated guess about who he'd expect to be looking for the subether phone (and, by extension, interdimensional internet browser) history: "ThisBetterBeImportantMortyGonnorheaFart001".

It doesn't take him very long to find logs of a text conversation from Man-Purse Morty's phone. 

[ Okay, I have good news and I have bad news.]

[ bad news 1st ]

[ The extractor has a triple-redundancy backup system and the new hazard codes means that the power to the factory can't go down unless this grid, and the four adjacent grids, all go down at the same time. If that does happen, then J-22 gets an instant tranquilizer to keep him down for the six seconds it takes for the emergency generator to come online, and if the flavor core and the security system aren't fully functional once those six seconds is up, the whole factory goes into automatic lockdown and has to be manually released by RDS3 himself. I'm not saying it's impossible, but if it can be done at all, it'll have to be done while the factory is live.]

[ ffffff whats the good news ]

[ There's a ton of backup extractor parts. No one ever needs them so they're just sitting there in a closet, if you want to come by on my lunch break we can go down to the basement and just build one. Got any memories you want turned into cookie flavoring? ]

Rick closes the log file, rolling his eyes. "Gross," he mutters.

Well, it's not that unusual. Mortys are emotionally-volatile little weirdos who get attached to things, and if love is an expression of familiarity over time, then Citadel Mortys run a statistically higher chance of developing an infatuation with their Ricks. If the cookie vodka is just rendered from the infatuation of a teenager, then it's not a mind-control drug any more than normal pubescent emotions; Rick takes a moment to scold himself for being so paranoid, and then congratulates himself on properly having his guard up. 

He hears his Morty come into the garage from upstairs, calling him from the top of the trapdoor to the sub-basement. "Rick? It's almost time, do you still wanna go or what?"

Rick looks back at the laptop; the software installer's got about two minutes left to go. He sets it back down next to the recompiler and sends the most recent of Man-Purse Rick's files to his own phone for reading material before he heads back up the ladder. Never hurts to know what other Ricks are working on, and not every Rick is so lame as to be an avid Pinterest user. 

"Eh, I can take it or leave it." Rick shrugs as he comes back up into the garage proper. "You look a little... invested."

Morty nods. He's got a backpack on now, packed fit to burst with tools and medical supplies and God knows whatever else Man-Purse keeps in his auxilary man-purse. "Yup! It's a rescue mission and we never get to do those. You still don't have to come, if you don't want to, but it sounds like it'll be worth it. Sigma told me a lot about the Citadel and it's creepy as hell, so I really don't think I care too much if we fuck the place up a little."

"Really?" Rick blinks. "You're talking about going to a place that's full of other-yous and other-mes to openly oppose it, and you're not going to cry over about the collateral damage?"

"Nope. I don't really _want_ any of our other-selves to get hurt or anything, but we're going there to save Sigma's Rick and the rest of the Citadel itself isn't worth protecting. And those guard Ricks are assholes, anyway."

It takes him a second while he checks Morty for signs of overconfidence and lying, but he comes up empty, and then his grin is so wide it actually makes his cheeks hurt, and he barely notices the itching between his shoulderblades. "HELL YEAH! Double Morty-Anti-Citadel Adventure for the win!" 

"C'mon, Sigma's getting the ship ready." Morty beams and scratches a spot just under his collarbone through his T-shirt. "You can even count it as my one-in-ten, if you want. I'm glad you're coming, though, this is gonna be fun."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter..orz


	4. Chapter 4

"Okay, so here's the plan." Sigma address up Rick and Morty at the door, fully-packed man-purse/duffle bag strapped to his back. "We're going to the Citadel the long way. I don't know where they're keeping my Rick, so I'm gonna have to use my m-- um, my homing signal to track him once we get close. I'm _hoping_ he's just in a hospital or something, but most likely he's in one of the brigs."

"You think he got _arrested_?" Morty balks. "Jeez, I thought you meant he got hurt in an accident or something. What'd he do?"

"Um, lots of stuff. Permanently leaving the Citadel is a lot more complicated than it used to be, and when we bailed, we kind of.. skipped all that, with bootleg portal fluid."

Rick rolls his eyes. "What's the fucking point of having a system to protect you from the government if you're not free to commit crimes against it?"

"That's not what the Citadel is anymore. I-i-it was never paradise or anything, but the problems were mostly because of our shitty personalities running unchecked. Before, you could pretty much come and go as you please, a-a-and if you lived there, it was your choice. Maybe it was never great, but it was good if you didn't have anyplace else." Sigma busies himself with his phone, arming the house's security systems while he explains. "Now you have to be licensed to own and operate a portal gun-- which has to be registered-- and be able to afford enough fluid to leave. Then you have to have safety certifications for your Morty if you're a Rick, and competency certifications for your Rick, if you're a Morty, and the evaluations for those are only done by appointment Monday through Friday between 11:00 AM and 4:00 PM... and that's just for _adventures_. I-i-i-if you want to leave permanently, there's a whole bunch of _other_ shit you have to do, plus you have to pay a fortune in fees and taxes."

"They don't even let Ricks and Mortys go on adventures?" Morty looks up at his Rick, worried; all he can think of is the pair of guard-Ricks appearing out of a portal, calmly informing him and Summer that they'd dispatch a team to assassinate C-137 instead of saving him.

Rick saves him the trouble and puts a hand on his shoulder. "So what _is_ the Citadel now? If it's not a safe haven for Ricks to hide from the government and it doesn't support Ricks going on adventures with Mortys, what the Hell does it _do_?"

"It's a prison. It used to be the same as it was in the real world, regular old corruption and greed, but it wasn't.." Sigma sighs, frustrated, but his phone bleeps an alert and interrupts him; he opens the front door. "Look, we can talk about it in the ship. The airlock's finished pressurizing."

"Airlock?"

Sigma releases the blast shields over the front door and heads on outside. The ship is parked in the driveway under what looks a bit like a clear resin dome, connected to the front of the house by a tube like a giant Habitrail.

"Holy shit, what the fuck did Man-Purse Rick do to this place? I mean, no judgment over here, I've ruined an Earth or two in my time, but usually the _planet_ makes it." Rick watches the floating wreckage of a midwestern suburb float through the sky as they head down the otherwise-familiar walkway.

"Federation blew it up for spite," Sigma explains, bottom-lining it for him to spare Morty the story again. "The blast shields and atmospherics saved the house, but I was home alone at the time. All that's left is a space-junk field and this asteroid now."

Rick scowls deeply, and Morty can practically feel the old hate like bile in the back of his own throat. "Did your Rick tag 'em back for it?"

"My original died trying. I like to think he did? B-but I'll never know. Sorry."

Rick swigs from his flask and watches a the crumpled remains of a suspension bridge drift past the house. "Mm."

The end of the tube is sealed with some kind of clear, mucus-like membrane that oozes apart when the three of them approach, and then seals itself back up once they're through. Sigma opens the ship and interrupts when Rick heads reflexively for the driver's seat. "Wait a sec-- who's a better shot with a minigun from a moving vehicle, you or Morty?"

Rick raises half his eyebrow and starts to say something, but Morty cuts him off, mainly because he's about ninety percent sure that whatever he's about to say is just going to be something mean and unhelpful about what a dumb question Sigma's asking. "Rick is, probably. The only weapons we have on ours-- uh, th-that I know of, anyway-- are controlled from the driver's seat and I've never fired them when the ship was moving, so I don't have a whole lot of practice."

"Then you're driving, and he's in the back, 'cause I have to navigate." Sigma pushes the passenger seat forward to let Rick in first. "A-and don't bitch about it, it's comfy back there."

Rick climbs in, and any irritation he might have had for taking a literal back seat to a couple of Mortys disappears quickly. Man-Purse Morty's ship looks like it was designed for road trips or stakeouts, or at least with a healthy respect for the possibility of getting stranded for long periods of time. The Rick that built it seemed to have put serious effort into it, like it had been his weekend project for a month or three, instead of just being the end product of Rick wanting more workspace in the garage and needing someplace else to put all the crap.

The back seat is more like a couch, plush and squishy-soft with smooth, soft leather upholstery. There's a pedestal-style console that Rick assumes is for operating whatever guns the ship has, speakers that serve as compelling evidence that there's a bitchin' sound system in here, and-- joy of joys-- an actual minibar along the driver's side wall, complete with fancy martini glasses in a little rack across the top. Inside, Rick finds several disappointingly small liquor bottles, along with two bottles of Yoo-Hoo that he tries not to find adorable.

Satisfied that Rick isn't going to be a hindrance for the next twenty minutes, the Mortys climb into the front and buckle in. Once the ship's sealed up, Sigma hits a garage-door opener on the dash that makes the resin dome retract into the driveway.

"Cleared for takeoff," he says. "You can just go straight upward from here full speed, there's an artificial pressure channel that keeps stuff from going directly over the house so the roof doesn't get hit. I don't _think_ the controls are going to be real different from what you're used to, but make sure to keep it steady until we're out of the junk field."

"Right." Morty starts it up, and the only difference he sees immediately is the smoothness of the ride and the brightness of the LED displays across the dashboard. The ride probably has more to do with the ship not having to break out of Earth's gravitational pull than the quality of the controls, but there's buttons and status lights on every conceivable surface. There's tons of _stuff_ installed in the ship, and Morty can only identify about half of it. "Jeez, look at all this, is it all for-- for a weapons system, or what?"

"Not _all_ of it." Sigma laughs, and starts pointing out buttons and switches. "The danger stuff is all on your left; shield generator on the top, signal jammer in the middle, hit both for stealth mode. The atmospherics are on your right, pressure regulation, oxygen and fire control-- you shouldn't need to mess with any of that. The activation for the weapons console is next to the emergency brake, and all that stuff on the steering wheel is for music, except that one, that one rolls up the partition."

Rick whistles, and manages to be only a little bit condescending. "Partition, huh? Pretty sweet setup you got back here, Man-Purse. Really-- really gunning for those five-star Uber ratings, aren't you?"

"I know you're saying it to be a dick, but you're not wrong," Sigma says. "Interplanetary rideshares can be worth a ton of money, plus it's a good way to get leads."

"Wow. I-I know it sucks that Earth.. um, exploded, but it's still pretty cool to have that much time for adventures." Morty grins and climbs into the driver's seat. He gives Sigma's wrist a pointed look while Rick's distracted, and it earns him a conspiring grin in return; weird soulmate stuff aside, it's fun to feel like they're sharing a secret, especially one that they're hiding from one of their Ricks.

"Right? I do kinda miss school, but.. not _school_ , just 'that place everyone my age used to go to for nine hours a day'." He sits back, watching the debris as the ship floats upward; a shattered school bus full of tiny bodies drifts by, weightless as a cloud. "You should quit and get your GED, if you haven't yet, by the way."

"Why? Didn't you just say you miss going to school?"

"Yeah, but you'd probably learn everything you need to graduate a lot faster if you did it at your own pace, with your own material, and then you have all the time in the world to do whatever you want. I mean, by now, most of us can disarm bombs, fly spaceships, cure a hangover, and hold a full-time job, but we're "stupid" because having to do anything sitting at a desk is boring and sucks and occasionally causes incontinence. It's bullshit, and--"

"Wait, other Mortys pee their desks? That's just a thing I-- we-- do?"

"Well, yeah. S-sometimes it's ... y'know, PTSD, lots of Mortys have seen some shit, but when you fall asleep sitting up, your brain just kind of assumes you're in space because usually, that means you're in the ship. And when your brain and your bladder can't agree if there's gravity or not, you might wake up in a puddle. I-i-it happens sometimes, it's not a big deal, but everybody at school just assumes you're just too dumb to b--"

"What!?" Morty stares back at his counterpart. "Holy shit, seriously? There's a-a-a _scientific_ reason for that?" He looks at the rearview mirror to focus on the backseat. "Rick? Did you know about that?"

Rick looks up from his martini and his phone, clearly having been ignoring this conversation since he sat down. "Know about what? Though, to answer your question, yes."

"Why Mortys can pee their desks if they fall asleep?" Sigma repeats. "Jeez, C-137, you really don't track _any_ of that stuff?"

"Well, Man-Purse Morty, I assume by "stuff", you mean the statistics of common problems faced by Ricks and Mortys in their home dimensions. Yes, I know about it, and no, I don't 'track' research published on the Citadel, mostly because it's irrelevant."

"They made us go to family counseling for that! You almost killed yourself trying to weasel out of it, why didn't you just _say_ it was a science thing? Y-y-you could have at least helped me out and told Mom it wasn't about her and dad," Morty huffs, exasperated in retrospect. "I still haven't lived it down, y'know, th-they still call me Puddles at lunch."

"Well, that's hilarious, but I didn't bother telling your school because I don't give a shit what your school thinks, and neither should you. And I _did_ tell your mom it had nothing to do with her." Rick rolls his eyes and goes back to his phone. "You and your sister have temperamental bladders anyway, probably because your dad's body is about fifty percent water and twenty percent fear piss, i-i-it's not pretty but it's a reality we all have to live with, Morty, I didn't think it warranted discussion because _it didn't matter_. Summer was huffing enamel because she didn't think to ask me where to get the good stuff, you wet your desk because the human nervous system doesn't have a working knowledge of physics, your mother was blaming you because she was too insecure about her own decisions to accept that it would have happened whether she was Beth Sanchez or Betty Crocker, and your school forced us all to go to counseling because it didn't care if there was a rational explanation or not, they just wanted the problem to go away. You were the only person involved that didn't cause the initial problem or make it worse by acting like an idiot, it's not my fault you didn't realize it at the time."

He takes a moment to give Sigma a pointed, irritated glare. "And I don't need a monthly newsletter, published by a bunch of egghead Ricks who like to crunch the numbers on whether the average Rick's left or right testicle is statistically the sweatier of the two, to tell me there's nothing wrong with my Morty."

"Ugh." Sigma settles back in the passenger seat again and digs the heels of his palms into his temples for a minute, then he goes digging in his duffle bag for the ibuprofen. "Jesus tapdancing Christ. We're gonna be at the Citadel anyway, Morty, you wanna stop by the Coordinations deparment and trade his ass in while we're there?"

Rick straightens up, and just from the way his posture shifts and takes a breath to speak, he's gone from casual rudeness to sincere vitriol, but Morty beats him to it. "Nah. I like being the Rickest Rick's Morty, and even if there's some stuff I wish he'd be better about, a-and he'd probably trade me in if he didn't have to deal with paperwork, he's still my Rick, and I love him the way he is." He laughs, genuine enough that it makes Rick's mouth snap audibly shut. "Cut him a little slack, okay? I know it didn't sound like it, but for him, that was actually a pretty okay compliment."

"Is it? ... Jeez." Sigma looks between the Rick in the backseat and the Morty at the helm, and then focuses forward again, then pops the pain-relief pill in his mouth and swallows it dry. "...Well. Just so you're _both_ aware, there's a certain amount of high-grading that goes into getting paired with a new Rick. I-I-I've met Ricks who would _duel in the street_ to get paired with the Morty who survived being C-137's."

"Well, since the Mortys who have to _get_ paired with their Ricks are the ones imprisoned on the Citadel, I'd imagine being the Morty of the one Rick in the central-finite curve who _doesn't_ have to suck some bureacrat's dick every time he wants ice cream would be considered a pretty sweet gig, too," Rick snaps back.

"Whatever, C-137."

"A-anyway." Morty interrupts, changing the subject, "What were you saying before? About quitting school and getting my GED?"

"Right-- yeah." He straightens up again, focusing. "School isn't super helpful for Mortys usually, they write us off as hopeless idiots because we just don't function well in a school environment. The Mortys who go to alternative schools or just get homeschooled usually do great."

"I don't think my parents would go for it. My mom's a surgeon and my dad's kind of stupid. I mean, he's unemployed, i-i-if I asked him to homeschool me he'd do it, but I don't think I'd really learn anything. I guess that's not much different than now, really, considering all the classes I miss anyway... But then I wouldn't get to see Jessica, that's the best part of my day, usually."

"You could just..y'know, ask her out?"

"She's got a boyfriend. If I quit school I wouldn't be able to hear about it when she's single, she's not the kind of girl who posts every dumb thing about her life on Facebook, y'know, she's more-- more sophisticated than that."

"Well, so what? She's not married to him, right? Get homeschooled for a year, pass the GED, get a good part-time job, maybe put in some overtime, get some money together, take her somewhere _really_ great."

"Yeah, I ...already kind of did all that? I was a stock broker for a little while, made a couple million, got a penthouse in the city..."

Sigma gawks. "And it _still_ didn't work?"

"Nope."

"...Okay, well then, you're fucked on the Jessica front, but you should still quit school."

"I'll talk to my mom about it. Okay?"

"Good." Sigma nods. "And if you need help studying, you can always come visit me and my Rick whenever, I still have my study guides and stuff, a-a-and we're definitely gonna owe you a favor by the end of this anyway." He rubs his wrist through his sleeve again, like it aches, or it itches.

"Yeah." Morty tries to be encouraging, but he can't help feeling bad; if he didn't think he'd make the situation worse by apologizing, he'd be tripping over himself to do it. Really, though, it's more that he feels pity for Sigma than guilty for Rick: Morty doesn't exactly know what it means to have a soul-mate-- or to _be_ one, for that matter-- but he can imagine how upsetting this must be for him . Being divided from someone you love, knowing they're suffering someplace where you can't reach them, is bad enough. But Morty _does_ know the pain of seeing someone who _looks_ like someone you love, only for them to say or do something that makes it clear that they're definitely _not_ that person.

He'd like to offer his condolences, reassure him that they're going to save Sigma-Rick and take them home safely, but that would risk outing him to the Rick in the back seat, and that would open a whole new can of judgemental worms. Morty knows that if it were him in the passenger seat-- if it were Jessica they were rescuing, if he had to hide the beautiful tattoo that connected her heart to his, if he had to depend on the help of another Jessica who does nothing but call him names and treat her version of him like crap-- he wouldn't be handling it anywhere near as calmly. But he can't, so he lets it go, and tries to offer him solidarity instead of sympathy.

The ship finally clears the debris field; from this distance, it's practically an asteroid belt, a massive ring of broken skyscrapers and cars and huge chunks of rock and earth and so many, many shattered human bodies. He can see what he's pretty sure is the dome of the White House, tumbling lazily though the mess like a pumice stone being washed down a river.

"I think we're through," he says, and nods in the direction of Sigma's lap, ostensibly at his phone but more at his wrist. "Which way does your homing.. uh, thing, say we're going?"

Sigma makes a couple of quick tap-and-swipes for show, flipping through a couple of pictures in his gallery: one of Summer with a half-shaved pixie cut in a cute pink windbreaker, and one of his original Rick holding a fancy cupcake, lit cigarette sticking out of the icing like a candle. He focuses, briefly closing his eyes, and then he points. "That way. Our two o'clock, I think. It'll get more exact as we get closer."

"Got it."

"The Citadel itself usually isn't all that far off," Sigma clarifies. "So unless my Rick is off-site somewhere, or it teleports someplace while we're on the way, we should be there in about an hour. Will you be okay to drive that long?"

"Should be fine." Morty twists a little, keeping his focus forward-- eyes on the road, even if there's technically no road-- and tosses a little head-up nod towards the backseat. "A-a-are you okay back there?"

Rick startles, having been deeply absorbed in something on his phone so much he actually drops his (thankfully empty) martini glass, prompting a snapped _"Shit!"_ as he reflexively whips his phone out of the potential splash zone. "Jesus, Morty, wh-wh-what are you trying to do, give me a heart attack? I'm fine, let's get moving already."

"Just checking." Morty half-snorts a laugh before he hits the gas.

"Oh, and Man-Purse?"

"It's a _duffle bag_."

"Just so you know? I do have a voucher for a free Morty." He goes back to looking at his phone, too casual to be genuinely casual, and reaches up the back of his shirt with his free hand to scratch at a spot between his shoulderblades. "If I _wanted_ to trade him in, I could've done it already, no paperwork required."

"Whatever, C-137."

Sigma doesn't respond to Rick any futher than that, and the matter is dropped, but he slants a quick, conspiring look Morty's way anyway; Morty's not paying attention, but he's still smiling, even when he reaches up to scratch his shoulder.


	5. Chapter 5

Rick loses interest in whatever the Mortys are talking about fairly quickly. He's not going to trade in his Morty and he knows damn well that his Morty isn't going to trade him in for a new Rick. For starters, he's not a Citadel Morty, and even if he was, they can't even do that. At best, he could submit himself for reassignment to a new dimension and a new Rick. But he wouldn't. And even if he did, Rick has a voucher, he could just get a new Morty, no fuss, no muss.

It's fine. It doesn't matter. He's not special. _You're_ not special.

_Don't think about it._

He goes back to his phone. Most of what Man-Purse Rick has in the way of projects in his "recently accessed" directory, it turns out, is musical. Not entirely surprising, given the instruments set up in the garage; Rick hadn't done much exploring in the house itself, but if the rest of the family is dead, he suspects at least one of the rooms has been converted to a recording studio by now. Jerry's study, maybe, it's not like Jerry ever did anything academic in there.

Rick had spent most of the trip through the junk field sifting through what he assumes is Man-Purse Rick's idea of a concept album about the blown-up Earth. It's all original works-in-progress, disorganized bits and bobs dumped into about twenty different folders all labeled 'New Folder'; he's not about to actually play any of the tracks included in the project files while they're in the ship-- the last thing he needs is Man-Purse Morty complaining about privacy or showing unfinished work and having a second, superior Morty to back him up-- but going by the sheet music and guitar tabs, it's not half-bad. The titles have a bit of charm to them, too: _Alaska's A Comet_ , _The Sky Was Blue But You'll Have To Take My Word For It_ , _Sideways WalMart_ , _Wished On A Star While I Shat On The Moon_.

The text documents are mostly predictable: unfinished lyrics that range from 'trite' to 'actually pretty good', weird notes-to-self about instrument choices and equipment ("put crisco on shit subwoofer, did not improve device performance but did make cool noise; try butter next"), and other, nonsensical things that were probably written while Man-Purse Rick was drunk.

One of the file names had seemed out of place, though, both in the sense of being unrelated to the rest of the subject matter and for being written by a Rick:

**soulmates_are_a_real_thing.doc**

He'd expected it to be more lyrics, maybe Man-Purse Rick's idea of a science-themed ballad or something, but when he actually opens it, it's much too long for that. Well, whatever; it's a road trip and the Mortys are yammering about Morty stuff, at least it'd eat up some time.

_\--_

_Earth of Dimension L-58 Sigma 12, possibly the dimension itself, has a phenomenon where the energy field of an individual extends and responds to that of another, causing disordered pigmentation of the skin. Humans of this dimension recognized this as the means by which a person identifies their soulmate, hence the name 'percarus', from the Latin, 'beloved'._

_From what I've been able to read on the subject, there's no regard for age, sex, gender, or appearance, but it's almost universally understood to be an intense love between those who share it, with accompanying physical desires that defy all other pre-existing preferences (and prejudices, and culture, and circumstances; apparently this dimension's Third Crusade got fucking weird because Richard the Lionheart and Saladin were soulmates. Still hoping to find a book on it at some point.) Pretty much every major civilization regarded the relationship between marked soulmates as being mandated by a higher power because it's completely beyond either party's control. That bond was considered sacred to the point that, as far as I can tell, there has never been a culture on this version of Earth that_ didn't  _have full marriage equality,  at least as regards marriages between soulmates.   This is all weird and fascinating to me.  Some of the things I've read imply that the intense attraction and love between people sharing a ""Percarus Mark" is a real, measurable force._

_The planet's gone, so my ability to do any serious research on this is limited. The Rick native to this dimension apparently didn't study it until after the death of his wife (he left design notes that indicate he tried and failed to make a "soulmate emulator" to alleviate the pain of grief after her passing), and he's dead now, but this is what I was able to piece together from his records and project documents and the few books I was able to recover:_

_"_ _Percarus Marks" (ie, soul marks) are tattoo-like discolorations of the skin that appear as abstract images, usually between two and six inches across. They can appear on almost any point on the body and can be virtually any color in the visible spectrum. (Rick L58S12 describes the color as corresponding to the partner's "aura", but his notes don't explain what that means in this context; I'm assuming that since he was actually from this dimension, auras were common knowledge here and he took their existence and definition for granted). They manifest when the energy fields of two or more individuals interact for the first time, so about half of all percarus marks manifest either at birth or in-utero, and most people have one by their tenth birthday._

_There's no way to study it now, but at the time of this Earth's destruction, the most prevalent theory was that a person's mark appears at the point where their own energy field extended out from their physical body to reach their partner's, so wherever your mark is, that's what part of your body was "facing" theirs. I'm curious to know whether that means an aura can pass through solid matter (if one's soulmate is born on the opposite side of the planet, does your mark manifest on the sole of your foot?) but there's no way to examine that either. Strangely, death has no effect on a Percarus mark: it implies that the energy field continues to exist after a person dies-- does the existence of soulmates prove the existence of souls?-- but there's no way to know that, either._

_The Mark's "image" can be almost anything. Some of RIck L58S12's notes indicate that most marks are actually combinations of two patterns, one for each partner, and the complexity of the pattern is directly correlated to the complexity of the person's personality and mental state. He uses Beth and Jerry of L58S12 as an example: their Percarus mark is an elaborate, vaguely floral pattern of blocky, angled, colorless "petals" in the negative space of a multicolored "puddle", referencing Beth's high intelligence and rigid, dominant personality being delineated by Jerry's nature as a shapeless blob of a man. (Rick L58S12's notes don't mention the meaning of individual colors, if color does have any significance, but they do imply that for a percarus mark to hold more than one color, or to have no color at all, is exceedingly rare.) I've seen pictures of a few others that seem to align nicely with this theory, including a trio of soulmates whose marks take up most of their left legs and incorporate three distinct patterns, but again, no way to truly confirm._

_"Percarus Resonance" is the reaction of a sentient creature's energy to that of its partner, which causes a whole host of different physical and psychological effects. Pretty much all the anecdotal evidence describes it as a form of magnetism, but I can't confirm whether or not that's literally true. People who share a Mark are able to detect changes in each others' conditions (physical and non-physical, positive and negative) and most are able to judge their soulmate's whereabouts relative to their own; close physical contact usually results in an altered state of consciousness and heightened awareness. Among the ones mentioned in various sources:_

_\- outsourcing cognitive/perceptive tasks to the soulmate's brain (ex. a colorblind man being able to see color while holding hands with his wife, an amputee relieving phantom pain by looking at her soulmate's arms)_

_\- abstract apotheosis on contact (usually brief and dreamlike, difficult to describe objectively but usually a positive experience)_

_\- relief of anxiety/depression symptoms (n/a if both soulmates are afflicted with the same disorder; the entry in the DSMVI for "Percarus Feedback-Loop Syndrome" actually uses the word "sucks" to describe it)_

_\- extrasensory perception (exceedingly rare, like "happens in shitty romantic dramas that are based on true stories" rare, but limited to things described like astral projection or remote viewing of the soulmate's surroundings at a distance. No idea how that shit works, if it ever did.)_

_I wish I'd learned about this place before the Feds blew it up. I can't believe the Rick of this dimension wasn't crowing about this to all his other selves. How many problems could the Citadel have avoided if the most damaged Ricks could identify and locate people who could serve as adapters for all the things about the world that don't make sense to them? If the most unstable Mortys could find people who can balance them out better than their assigned Ricks? If we could just evacuate them to this dimension, we could make some huge, huge strides in improving their overall quality of life. And maybe get some Beths and Jerrys permanently separated, he can't be her soulmate in every dimension._

_I'm writing all this down because I won't be able to speak on it objectively soon. Unbiased research is about to get a lot harder, because I have a Percarus mark coming in on my chest. It won't be fully formed for another few days, and I can't feel anything from it yet, but I'm excited to see what it looks like, even if I never actually find my soulmate. I hate this kind of hope because it means disappointment is right around the corner, but this answers so many of my questions. I think I can be okay with it, even if i never find them, or if they're already dead. On some level, my soulmate exists and I will be in permanent contact with them from now on, and I can prove it. I wish every Rick could feel this. For me, loneliness just became **obsolete**._

\--

 

Rick rereads it two, three, four times before he lets himself stop and think about it. He's heard of planets and dimensions that have things like this: they call them different things, soulbonds, mate-melding, threads of fate, psychic imprinting, but they're all more or less the same trite, illogical garbage as normal love. The only difference is that people come pre-packaged with a biopsychological justification for why getting into deeply committed relationships is seen as necessary, and why the collapse of those relationships is a hundred times more shameful; creation itself picked out this very special person just for you, and you _still_ couldn't make it work? It's stupid, but those worlds exist, it happens. But not on _Earth_ , not with humans. And definitely nothing as cheesy as this soul-mark bullshit, like humans in this dimension evolved from My Little Ponies somehow.

There's mention of research but no mention of sources, and with the Internet of this dimension having gone the way of the exploding dinosaurs, he can't just Google it. He takes a surreptitious look in Man-Purse Morty's direction; if Man-Purse Morty is _this_ dimension's original Morty, then this would all be stuff he'd have grown up with as just a regular part of his reality. He probably has a soul mark of his own, and he'd probably know at least a little bit about his original Rick's. That thought twists his insides a little bit. The idea that Rick L-58 Sigma 12 had tried to build a machine to replicate the experience of having a soulmate is... disturbing. If it was simply a matter of wanting to be with this one specific individual so badly, he could have just cloned them. If he had undeniable proof that this person was his soulmate, and he depended on them so deeply that he couldn't accept their death, and he was so into disaster-preparedness that his Morty carries a Man-Purse for adventures and he rigged his daughter's home with a backup artificial atmosphere and a gravity grid, _just in case the planet blew up_ , there's no way he wouldn't have a back-up file of all his soulmate's memories and a clean DNA sample for cloning.

Unless, of course, the thing that makes them your soulmate is their _soul_ , and you don't know how to measure or interact with whatever a soul is made of, or be sure that it would come into existence with the clone's new consciousness. The concept isn't strange to him at all; Rick had transported his own consciousness across several bodies over the course of his lifetime, but "consciousness" for him meant things like brainwave patterns and memories, data that he could download into the highly-sophisticated computer that is the sapient brain. The idea that there could be something more to that process had been immediately dismissed, there never seemed to be any loss of knowledge or function that came with transferring himself from one body to the next that couldn't be explained by a lack of raw processing power. With a perfect clone and a likewise perfect brain, there shouldn't be any reason for a cloned soulmate to be an imperfect copy.

The fact that this other Rick _hadn't_ done that, despite having access to all the resources he would need, implied strongly that he _couldn't_ \-- or if he could, then he wouldn't get the results he wanted. And, of course, because reality is a cruel, dumb animal, and the Federation is a steaming pile of bureaucratic bullshit, the one Rick who may have been able to prove that human souls exist and love is more than a brain-chemical cocktail is dead.

And now this other Rick, Man-Purse Rick, is... in prison, probably? Leave it to a Morty to go running facefirst into the Citadel for the ass-hat that wrote _"My Lawn Gnome is an Astronaut"_. In a way, it's kind of touching. Also kind of stupid, because what the fuck is a Morty gonna do to get a Rick out of prison that a Rick can't do to get himself out, but that's not the point. The point is that the Citadel sucks, and if there's any prison in the world that needs to get its shit ruined, it's the one built to hold people who commit crimes against _another, bigger prison_. Rick elects to set the matter of soulmates aside for now.

The philosophical questions raised by the concept are complicated, and the answers slowly dredging themselves up out of the swamp of denial in the back of his brain are disturbing. Really picking that puzzle apart will take more effort than he can expend on it now, even though he can already feel those gears starting to turn; for now, all that noise can be quieted by drowning it in gin and vermouth, so he pours himself another martini. Besides, prison breaks are fun, and this _is_ supposed to be an adventure, committed against a shitty authority that wants to make adventures as difficult and frustrating as possible. The heavy shit can wait until the party's over.

He's finally broken out of his distracted stupor when one of the Mortys up front says "Hey, there it is!", and points to a gleaming artificial structure in the distance, floating in the sea of darkness and stars like a magnificent golden turd, crowned with a gigantic, neon "KICK ME" sign.

In the passenger seat, Man-Purse Morty straps up his duffle bag. "ETA is about six minutes. I should be able to reach the Citadel's intranet from here; once I find us a place to land, we just go in, find my Rick, wreck whatever's been him and us, and then bail. Sound good?" Morty looks back at his Rick for approval, first traces of nervousness setting into his shoulders, but Rick knows him well enough to tell that it's just pre-jump jitters, not second thoughts.

Rick closes the stolen folders on his phone, puts it away, and downs the rest of his glass. "Music to my ears."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Infodump ahoy! I'm sorry this is such a short chapter but I wanted the obligatory 'exposition of how soulmates work in this AU' to be self-contained enough to be comfortably skipped on a second read-through. orz thank you for your patience.


	6. Chapter 6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Citadel looks different from the outside. Morty's only ever seen the complex housing the Council's headquarters, and even that looked more like a weird Rick-and-Morty themed airport terminal than anything else. Passing over this dark, dingy corner of the Citadel's actual city streets is depressingly mundane compared to what Morty had seen on his previous visits: no glorious golden statues or mirror-polished tiles, no fancy, hypermodern storefronts with bright neon signs, no roaming, dapper sales-Ricks with goofy smiles and dorky merch. The buildings are cramped and uneven and splattered with graffiti, an uncomfortable number of the streetlights are making electric _pop_ noises and spraying sparks like spittle when they flicker, and some of the storm drains are choked with ordinary trash; it reminds Morty of the creepy picture book at the dentist's office, the one full of photos of cancer-ridden gums and neglected teeth.

Sigma directs him to a good place to land: a filthy impound lot full of bubble-domed UFO's, most of which have been left there so long they look more like drydocked boats than parked cars. The lot itself looks closed, the office at the far end of the lot is dark and dingy and weirdly mundane, save for the weird, robot Dobermans "sleeping" in front of the doors.

Morty's eyes dart around the lot as he lands the ship in an empty space near the middle of the lot. "Won't it be hard to leave if they think the ship's been impounded? If it's as bureaucratic and greedy as you say, that sort of creates an obstacle for later, doesn't it?"

Rick takes the opportunity to stash a couple of the little liquor bottles from the minibar into his coat. "Who's gonna stop us? It's not like we're gonna drop what we're doing to have a chat with the clerk at the window. It's an entire lot full of ships, we can just steal another one if we need it."

"We shouldn't, most of these probably don't even run anymore. Mainly I want to leave ours here because it won't get broken into or stolen. O-or towed." Sigma reaches into his duffle bag and pulls out a hard plastic filebox. He rifles through it and pulls out a set of three forms, one in white, one in pink, and one in yellow, and then hands them to Rick. "I'm still kind of hoping we can do this quietly. I-i-if you sign that as Rick N-422 'Hock Yard Rick', and mark it as 'paid in full', they won't question it. Since, y'know, it's your handwriting and all. If anybody asks, it was illegally parked on the street outside the Sanchez Bar and Grill on 48th."

"Why? Is that code for something?"

"No, it's just illegal to park a spacecraft there. Usually nobody would care, but since the Council got .. erm, taken out," Sigma pointedly doesn't focus on Rick for that last bit, "and the restrictions on travel got tighter, cops started getting bonuses for having them towed to an impound lot instead of ticketing them, then the impound lots pays the treasury a kickback for it when the owner has to pay to get their vehicle out. Makes more money for the Citadel, keeps people from going places.. kinda their deal now, y'know?"

"Assholes," Rick concludes. "So that's how you deal with this place now, e-e-everything's so corrupt and bureaucratic that you can just disguise your presence as an act of corrupt bureaucracy and slide on through?"

"Pretty much." Sigma tries not to look too ashamed, but he doesn't do a very good job. "It's sick, right? But it gives us an option on getting out of here without raising more ruckus than we have to."

Rick shoots his own Morty a quick look and then asks, dryly, "Do you actually care about raising ruckus? Because I don't know if you noticed, but prison breaks tend to be messy business, Man-Purse."

"Hell no, but I'm not leaving here without my Rick, and my Rick might be seriously injured by the time we find him. Once I have him, the only thing I care about is getting home as quickly and safely as possible, and those forms give us a shot at being able to leave calmly instead of booking it like obvious fugitives, y'know? It's a long shot, but better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it."

"Fucking hell. I can't believe I'm doing literal paperwork for an adventure, you've gotta be the most anal-retentive Morty on the curve. How many mega seeds you got up there right now?" He scowls as he fills out the triplicate forms, pen making hasty scratches as he puts sloppy checks in boxes and puts "N/A" for everything that requires an actual answer. "Do you ever just _do_ anything?"

Sigma casually flips him the bird. "Welcome to the Citadel, C-137: here, only half the population is the smartest man in the universe, the rest of us have to be ready in advance. Speaking of: I know you've never lived on the Citadel before, but do you guys have a callsign, in case you get separated? If you don't, you're gonna want to pick one."

"What, like in case one of us has to pick the other out of a crowd or something?" Morty asks.

"Everybody needs one. If something happened and you got split up, you might join up with another Rick and not realize he's the wrong one until you're sitting down for dinner in a dimension where everyone eats through their butt." Sigma grimaces a little at the thought, apparently speaking from personal experience. "The best ones are sign-and-countersign. And you should be careful with yours, Morty, your Rick is on the Most Wanted list, y-you're probably worth a lot of money to a bounty hunter."

"Jeez... well, I guess that's fair, he did kinda flatten the place a little." Morty turns to face his Rick, popping up onto his knees without having to twist in the driver's seat. "What should we use? A-a-a question and answer thing, maybe? Like you could ask 'Hey, did you remember to record Ball Fondlers?' and then I could say "Yeah, but it was a rerun"?"

Rick rolls his eyes, growing more and more annoyed by the second. "It's supposed to be something another Rick couldn't _accidentally_ ask you, dummy. We don't need anything like that anyway, relax. You're chipped, if I lose you in a crowd of a bunch of other Mortys-- and I can't see well enough to just pick you out by sight, which I could, because I'm not the kind of idiot who can't tell two Mortys apart-- I can just make you play a ringtone."

Morty balks, going from 'a little excited about doing neat spy stuff' to 'absolutely livid about having his body modified without his knowledge again' faster than a mousetrap snapping shut. "You _chipped me_?! What the-- what the fuck, when did you _chip_ me?"

"Your _mom_ had you chipped, I just swapped out the one she was going to use for a better one. It was after we brought you back from that penthouse, remember?"

"Wait, a-a-after the-- oh, fuck me, _that's_ why she was so nuts about me getting a "flu shot" after being in the city so long?! Jeez..." Morty flops back against the driver's seat and rakes a hand through his hair, frustrated. "So, wh-wh-what, do I run Marshmallow now or something?"

"She was royally pissed off that whole time, y'know, y-you wouldn't tell us where you were living and she took it _really_ personally that the "healthy" version of you decided to completely cut off all contact with the family. She can't handle that kind of abandonment, Morty, she can barely tolerate it when you and I leave together for more than a couple of days, sh-sh-she lost her _shit_ when I came back alone, Morty." Rick tops up his flask from the minibar, and with that, his preparations for this adventure are complete. "And the chip's not that complicated, it just makes it so that if it doesn't connect to the house's wifi for longer than two weeks, it tags your location and sends it to your mom's phone. I added the ringtone thing for giggles, plus I made it so that she can't just GPS-tag you whenever she feels like it. I respect that you're her son, and she feels like she needs to know where you are, and you're probably dumb enough to get on the wrong bus once in a while, but y-y-you're not a stupid dog that might die of thirst if it can't find its own yard."

Morty sighs, thinking back to his post-detox state, and tries not to think about the part where the most stable and healthy version of himself cut himself out of his own home like he was the last healthy organ in a mangled corpse. He didn't like feeling like the only sane man in his house, not when he still wanted to be able to rely on his parents and look up to his big sister. He didn't like thinking poorly of his father like the rest of the universe seemed to do so naturally, or being disgusted with his mother's callous indifference to other people's feelings, or feeling envious of Summer's blissful ignorance and ease in making friends. The toxic version of himself had missed his family because he viewed his need to be part of his equally-toxic home life as painful and sick.

But in the end, the healthy version of himself did eventually let Rick find him, and now he knows a version of himself who lost his whole family in a world-ending cataclysm. The proof that he really would miss them if they were gone is standing next to him and carrying a duffle bag.

He resolves to forgive his mom for chipping him without his consent, and just like that, he lets it go. "Right.. well, thanks for that. So... uh, what's my ringtone?"

Rick takes his phone out; from the back of Morty's neck comes a slightly muffled, tinny version of a completely terrible disco-themed Europop song. It is, without a doubt, the most brainlessly annoying song he's ever heard that didn't involve a purple dinosaur.

It plays for about ten seconds before Rick hangs up and leaves another ten of utter silence, Morty fixing him with a glare flatter than a pressed pancake. "...You're an asshole, Rick."

"Hey, screw you, desk-wetter! Do you have any idea what I had to do to get that recording? Th-th-that's BABBA's _Disco Girl_ , i-i-it's one of the rarest occurrences on the central finite curve, and it sucks! It _sucks_ , Morty, and in the dimension where it got released as a single, it's considered the most emasculatingly catchy piece of shit ever to hit the airwaves."

"And that's why you put it _in my fucking neck_?"

"It's supposed to be _unique_ , Morty, I guarantee you and Man-Purse are the only Mortys on this entire stupid garbage barge to even know what that song is, let alone to have it as a ringtone." Rick scowls.

"We have unique songs! We have songs that _we did_ , Rick, y-y-you couldn't pick-- I don't know, Get Schwifty, or one of your Tiny Rick songs, or something from-- _Morty, I'm trying really hard to be your friend and if you don't stop laughing I swear to God I'm gonna call you Man-Purse too_."

 

\--

Once the paperwork's been completed and Sigma has stopped laughing, he takes out his newly-refilled portal gun and opens a bright-green puddle on the asphalt of the impound lot.

"I'm gonna take us to the police plaza, but after that, _no portal gun use_ until it's time to leave. My Rick modded this one to be invisible to the Citadel's security grid and I know a safe place for us to come out, but there are sensors all over the central districts that'll go off if they detect an unauthorized portal gun being activated."

Morty frowns. "Won't they be able to track it from here, too? My dad broke a portal gun once and a team of Citadel guards showed up in like, half a second to investigate, and we were at the dinner table on Earth. Wouldn't they be even faster o-on their own turf, even without a security system?"

"That's just for broken ones," Rick explains it in a somewhat less impatient tone than usual; Morty gets the feeling it's his way of saying " _good thinking_ " without actually saying so out loud, and it gives him a warm little burst of approval in the pit of his stomach. "If you break a machine that can rip holes in the fabric of reality, it causes an anomaly that-- y'know what? I'm not gonna go into it, i-i-i-it'll just go over your heads anyway, just think of it like ripping a silent-but-deadly fart that stinks up every possible reality for about half a second. It's distinct and highly detectable, so the Citadel has a team that watches for it. It's one of their few good ideas."

Sigma looks a little surprised himself. "I.. I didn't know that, thank you."

"Not surprised." Rick takes a sip from his flask, and pointedly doesn't say 'you're welcome'.

"A-anyway, don't worry about it here, Morty. This is Skidmark Park, the Council never spent fancy-security-grid money on a dump like this." Sigma smiles, and then focuses more on Rick. "But the police plaza is different: the reconstruction put a _lot_ of money into security after you wrecked the place up. The street-sensors detect the portal gun when it opens a portal, then scans it remotely: if it doesn't have a registration chip, it drops a pin on the gun's location and the grid tazes everything within 30 feet. So just be really, really careful not to accidentally butt-dial a portal open or something."

Morty cuts Rick off before he can say something mean again, "Can't we just portal into someplace a little less dangerous?'

"I know it sucks, but it's the fastest way," Sigma responds. "The Citadel only has three brigs: one of them is for Mortys, one of them is for Ricks convicted of minor crimes and Rickdemeanors, and one for Ricks convicted of felonies. If my Rick's been imprisoned, he'll be in that last one, and I'll be able to tell for sure once we get to the building."

"What if he's not there?"

"Then we're on foot, looking for him the regular way. It's not great, the longer we're here, the more likely it is that something will go wrong, but we just have to roll with it." His fingers twitch, lacking bootlaces to fuss with. "Y-you really don't have to-- don't need to help me, it's okay if you change your mind."

"You keep saying that, but it's really okay. I guess I'm just a little... I don't know, i-i-it's weird? Rick and I don't live on the Citadel so we should be free to have portal guns and stuff, but if we get punished for helping you, wh-what are they gonna do to us? Force us to live here? I definitely still do want to help you, I just want to understand the consequences if we fuck up."

"Don't worry about it," comes Rick's smooth response as he puts a hand on Morty's shoulder. "We're counting this one as a Morty Adventure, remember? You call the shots: the only consequences the Citadel can enforce on you are the ones you want to let them have."

It's a familiar touch, there's nothing different in the way he leans in a little to be able to reach comfortably or the sanguine grin accompanying his reassuring words, but the warm, feather-light brush of those skillful fingertips is suddenly the center of his entire world. That weird itching goes away, too. He smiles, lets it straighten his back; he really _does_ feel better. "R-right. Thanks, Rick."

"Anytime, baby." Rick punctuates it with a light clap just above the small of his back. "What do you say, Man-Purse? You finally ready to get this show on the road, or what?"

Sigma takes a deep, shaky breath as he nods, and Morty instantly feels like a complete asshole. Here they are, getting to rescue Sigma's injured, possibly dying soulmate, and here he is, smiling like a goon because Grampa Rick gave him a pat on the back.  
If Sigma notices, though, he doesn't mention it, just shakes it off and focuses on the task at hand. "Okay, just... try to blend in. I-I-I know that sounds dumb because we all look the same anyway, but try not to look surprised or excited unless everybody else is, too. Okay? Let's go."

The portal blooms open on the asphalt, casting the lot and a sea of spaceships in a wash of bright, yellow-green light. The three of them disappear into it, ready to traverse the Citadel of Ricks on foot from here on out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another short chapter orz ... I'm very sorry, I was absolutely sick as a dog the past two weeks and I have houseguests visiting at the moment. I won't have much time for writing until they leave. Thank you for your patience!
> 
> BABBA's "Disco Girl" is a reference to Gravity Falls;


	7. Chapter 7

 

 

 

 

 

 

The portal from the impound lot opens onto a public bathroom.

  
Morty's first thought on seeing it is that Sigma can't be stupid enough to think that a public bathroom, that anyone might be able to use at any time, would be a safe place to portal into. Everything on the Citadel was designed by a man who spends a significant percentage of his day-to-day life emptying the contents of his body at sometimes-random intervals, the one place you'd be guaranteed to find a Rick in any given building would be a toilet.

Then the smell hits his nose.

It's not a  _bad_ smell, certainly not as bad as he'd expect, but it's stale and vaguely swampy, like the water's been standing and there hasn't been any active ventilation in a while. When Sigma turns to face them and the portal blorps out of existence, the motion-activated lights awkwardly flicker to life, out of sync and slightly yellowed; one of them shorts out entirely.

"If you gotta go, now's the time." Sigma holsters the portal gun. "We're in the auxiliary domestic communications office. This part of the building ought to be empty, so we shouldn't have any trouble getting outside without being seen."

"Isn't it kinda dangerous to bring us out of a bathroom?" Morty asks. "If anybody's gonna be in here after-hours, that's probably where they'd need to be, right?"

"It's the Mortys room, it's fine. Most of the data-entry here is bottom-rung Rick work, I'd be surprised to hear that any Mortys actually worked here." Sigma points to a vending machine mounted on the wall that, for a quarter, will dispense a clean yellow T-shirt.

Rick rolls his eyes. "Great, segregated bathrooms. Every time I come here I find a new reason to hate this shithole."

"It's not like that. Ricks and Mortys have some... insurmountable physical differences, when it comes to bathroom needs." Sigma scoots over to the door and crouches to look underneath it, presumably to look for signs of people outside, and lowers his voice. "It's just easier to have separate bathrooms than to try to build a one-size-fits-all plumbing system. Water treatment is a big deal, you don't want your overdose vomit and your beer diarrhea and your gallons of Morty-jizz ending up in the same filtration tanks."

"Gross." Morty grimaces at the thought. "You really weren't kidding about the problem being caused by too many of us being in one place."

"If any given universe only has room for one Rick and one Morty at a time, packing tens of thousands of us into the Citadel is like stuffing a herd of cattle into a sardine can, except they get booze-shits and jerk off three or four times a day. Reason number five billion why the Citadel was a bad idea from the beginning."

Sigma takes a deep breath. "... One more thing, before we get out there."

"Jesus, haven't we discussed this enough? I get that you don't have a lot going on, Man-Purse, but my Morty and I have other shit we could be doing."

"It'll only take a second, and we're in a really good place for it. This is especially important for you, C-137." Sigma opens the door and heads out into the corridors on the other side.

The building is dark and quiet, but the glossy, polished look of the decor makes it seem creepy and ominous. Morty hates how loud his footsteps sound on the faux-marble tile flooring, and he figures they must be on an upper floor because the hallways are too short and twisting for any of the doors they pass to belong to anything meant to hold more than two or three people at a time, the overhead fluorescents casting creepily long shadows down the walls from the door placards. _504 - Civic Development Permits, 504 - Public Transportation, 503 - Emergency Services, 502 - Judiciary Records [Central]_

Sigma stops outside the last door before the stairwell and points.

 _502a - Judiciary Records [Presidential]_. The sign is much newer than the others, with a very small, slightly discolored area on the wall around it, as if the old placard had been a little off-center and whoever installed the new one hadn't felt like touching up the paint.

"After the Council was disbanded, on account of everybody on it being dead, it was agreed by pretty much everyone that all the Council Ricks were shitbags anyway, so the Citadel installed a democracy to replace them. The new President would have had to put a lot of effort into establishing authority over the Citadel anyway, but the one that actually got elected has a real fucking boner for Ricks that don't submit."

"Literally or figuratively?"

"Gross."

"C'mon, Rick, it's a valid question. I mean, i-i-if the Council Ricks wanted to screw you over because you're the Rickest Rick, and the new Rick President has a fetish for anarchist Ricks, that could... uh, seriously affect how you're treated on arrest."

"I'm not going to prison on the Citadel, Morty, don't be stupid."

Sigma coughs. "Um, I meant it figuratively, but my point is that the president has the authority to sentence anyone who's been accused of a crime without a trial, same as the Council did. It's the kind of thing that only happens with high-profile Rick offenders, but you're about as high-profile as it gets and your Morty is a top-tier commodity. If you and your Morty are gonna get into this with me, you should know the risk you're taking, here, there might be a standing order to--"

"The only risk I'm taking is the risk that I'll die of old age before you get your fucking shit together, Man-Purse! No one cares about the fuUURPcking risk! We're here for a prison break, the whole point of coming to this gold-plated septic tank is to destroy the consequences you're pissing your stupid pants about. My Morty wants to help you and I want to hang out with my Morty so that's what we're doing, end of story. Stop trying to talk us out of it and let's just go get your dumbass Rick. Or do you want him to get executed while you're flapping your stupid mouth?"

"Jeez... I just.. didn't ... " Sigma shrinks a little; he knows C-137 is right, and he knows he's saying all this, repeating himself and finding every excuse to talk them out of this 'adventure' because his original Rick raised him to obsess over details and to be very clear about every piece of information that could influence any decision anyone makes, but it stings. "Y-you're right, let's just--"

"Wait."

"God damn it, Morty, what now?"

"No, really!" Morty steps between him and Sigma. "You said your Rick's been missing since the weekend, right? And you started getting those signals on Monday?"

"Yeah?"

He points to the records door. "You said the new president i-i-is-- really hates disobedient Ricks, and your Rick escaped the Citadel with bootleg portal fluid and then had the nerve to come back, right? So, if the Citadel is as bureaucratic as you say, and if they really like to waste time, what are the odds that your Rick was arrested, tried, convicted, _and_  imprisoned in just two days?"

"...Holy shit, you really  _are_ the One True Morty!" Sigma launches himself at Morty to catch him in a quick, tight hug, and then furiously begins digging in his duffle bag like a pig hunting truffles; he pulls out a pair of gloves, a cable, and a handheld screen device that looks a bit like a dash-mounted GPS. "I can't believe I didn't think of that myself. I-i-if he got thrown in prison without a trial, there'd have to be a writ of attainder issued for him. We should be able to get those files through the terminal in this office, give me just a second to get the door open."

Rick leaves Sigma to it, preferring to focus on his own Morty for the moment. The annoyance at all the delays simmers down almost immediately, and if Morty were a little less aware of how little Rick tended to think of him, he'd almost look proud. "Pretty slick thinking. You've been really on the ball all day, what side of whose bed did you wake up on?"

"Mine, I guess." He rubs the back of his neck, smiling as a watercolor wash of pink blooms in his cheeks at the actual, real compliment. "It just... sorta clicked for me. I feel like my head's been kinda clearer than usual all afternoon. Maybe it's just because I really think we're doing a good thing here?"

"Maybe. Nobody helps idiots like you do, that's for sure." Rick rolls his eyes, but it sounds just a little less derisive than usual, and it makes Morty smile. "So, what the Hell is 'The One True Morty'?"

"It's this weird cult thing. There's a Morty religion on the Citadel, they think that there's a One True Morty who'll lead all Mortys to self-actualization or something, and they think he's me because I got them to rise up against that creepy Rick that captured us that one time." Morty shrugs.

Rick raises half his unibrow at this. "Are you? Because nobody needs a Morty with an over-inflated ego, Morty, if we need to start talking about how to deal with a messiah complex--"  
"Hey, I didn't _start_  the stupid cult, they already had one of those weird comic book tract things printed up when I got there."

"That's not what I asked." Rick swigs from his flask. "If this cult thinks there's a One True Morty, and you're him, do _you_  think you're him?"

"I think we're _all_  me." Morty gestures to himself, frustrated with the idea. "The only way there can be a One True Morty is if all the _other_  Mortys somehow don't count as being true, and they all do. Even if none of us are special because we're so similar that we can be changed out like-- like light bulbs, o-or air filters, or diapers, and nothing would noticeably change, we can't share experiences or consciousnesses or memories or feelings. I'll never be any Morty but the Morty I am, and neither will anymorty else: one, true, Morty. All of me."

He's quiet for a few moments, taken a little aback by his grandson's weirdly passionate response. Rick had called him the 'Mortiest Morty', but hadn't really considered what that meant. What _does_  make a Morty a Morty, at least in this context? An overabundance of compassion? A knack for empathy, a willingness to put effort into understanding other people? A really ill-advised desire to help? Is Morty-ness a quality that other Mortys can recognize and become drawn to? He wonders, until that irritating voice in his head says _Who cares? My Morty is the one that matters, and he's right here._   He still wishes he could kick the fucker down the stairs.

"Careful there, Bodhisattva, that's the kind of existential shit that a cult-minded Morty could dangerously misinterpret and build a mythology around." Rick reaches into his lab coat and takes a swig from his flask, hoping to derail that train of thought with something better. "Is that why he came to our dimension for help? Because he thinks you're the Morty God?"

"I don't think so, he says the cult guys are creepy. They kiss their toes as a religious thing."

"Weird." Rick looks back over at the door, impatient. "Hey, Man-PuURRse, you got that door open yet?"

"Almost. They changed the format for the card codes since the last time I was here, I had to update my software." Sigma gestures to the keycard reader next to the door.

"Buttons and dials for teleporting the Citadel, keycard access for judicial records, wh-what's next, retinal scanners?" Rick rolls his eyes. "DNA tests? Fingerprint readers?"

"What are you complaining for? This is working in our favor." Sigma's phone beeps, and the red light on the reader flickers green. "Aaaaand we're in."

He leads them into a fairly spartan office and shuts the door behind them before hitting the lights. It's small and cramped, and the peeling, water-stained linoleum tile seems to imply that the space had been used as a janitor's closet or something. The furniture, at least, seems to be nice enough; a square, heavy wooden desk with an elegantly simple computer terminal, and a filing cabinet on the rear wall. The walls are bare and there's not much in the way of personal knick-knacks, but there's a framed picture of a Morty wearing a Christmas sweater on the desk next to the terminal; the little bronze nameplate reads R. SANCHEZ - B877.

"Okay. This computer should have access to the databases we need. All we have to do is..." Sigma types a few keystrokes, and is greeted with a tinny, digital recording of a Rick's voice saying  _Access DeniUURRed_ , and his face falls. "...figure out the password. Shit."

"What, you don't have anything in your purse for that?"

"I can't break into anything digital if it doesn't use the Citadel's core intranet, and this is just an auxiliary data-management office. The whole building probably only connects a couple of times a day to transmit data back to the primary office. And it's a _duffle bag_."

"Ugh. Move aside, Man-Purse. Your Rick taught you all this kind of shit, but he never taught you how to figure out a password?" Rick nudges Sigma out of the way and gets typing; he gets the same access-denied message three times before the computer warns him that the fifth attempt will lock him out of the machine, but he doesn't mention that to either of the Mortys, he just needs time to think it over.

"Well, usually he handles that kind of thing." Sigma leans against the wall, fingers kneading his wrist. "If it was a Morty's password, we'd be in business, but... that's the whole point of Ricks and Mortys being teamed up, you know? Ricks deal with the hard stuff, Mortys have soft skills. Between the two of us, we can handle just about anything."

"Whatever, Man PuURRse, your Rick is in prison because he was stupid enough to return to the scene of the crime. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you're looking like the smart one in the relationship." Rick types again, noting the total lack of personal decoration beyond a single Morty picture, and then takes a look into the wastepaper basket next to the desk. He pulls a few crumpled papers out and finds nothing but doodles of a Rick in a business suit being killed in various ways: disintegrated by a laser, hit by a bus, being stuffed so full of dildos he explodes like a dick piñata.  He throws the garbage back, types his final attempt, and allows himself a smug, satisfied grin as the computer announces  _Access GraUURnted_  to the room; he stands up and lets Sigma back at it.  

"That was quick, what was the password?"

"Password".

"...And you say  _my_ Rick is stupid. Jesus Christ."

"Well, since he didn't have the brains to just leave the Citadel instead of casually coming back to someplace where he's a wanted criminal, and he wasn't smart enough to get away from the pigs?"  Rick points to the computer.  " _This_ guy just hates his job and knows that if there's a security breach, his boss gets fired.  _Your_ Rick is an idiot because he got himself caught."

Morty takes a couple of steps, situating himself between Rick and Sigma. "C'mon, leave him alone, Rick. It's not like you never went to prison, y'know."

"I went to prison by choice because I needed to get my fingers on the Federation's currency standard. Man-Purse Rick took the risk of using bootlegged portal fluid to get off this stupid crap-satellite, actually succeeded, and then came back to it _and_  still got caught, even though his own Morty knows how deep the security rabbit hole goes, apparently." Rick sighs, frustrated with the whole situation. "What the Hell was he even doing? What could he possibly need from the Citadel that he couldn't get anywhere else?"

Sigma swallows as he hunts through the files for the information he needs. "...V-459."

Morty frowns. "...V-459? You said he had to get something from his old apartment."

"V-459 is the Rick that lives in his old apartment now." Sigma's face is tense and maybe a little guilty for not-technically lying to a Morty who's explicitly told him he's trying to be friends. "That's...that's why my Rick was on the Wanted list. Ricks don't do well in captivity, the Citadel has to put a lot of effort into keeping them so busy that they just chalk up the misery of living on the Citadel as being their regular misery. Almost all of them have clinical depression and most are prone to suicidal ideation, so most of them are okay with keeping busy because it keeps them from wanting to kill themselves."

Morty skirts a look at his Rick; Rick just sips from his flask and says nothing.

"But every Rick has his limits, and when they finally can't take this shit anymore... they snap. Usually they just kill themselves, but sometimes they go for something a little more external." Sigma pauses in his search to open an app on his phone and slides it towards his counterpart. "My Rick developed a program that monitors and tracks fluctuations in the Genius Wave Field that surrounds the Citadel. When a Rick spikes too high for too long, we extract him before he can do any damage to himself or anyone else. The defense department has no idea how we do it and no idea where we live, we always portal in so it looks like we're coming from a different dimension."

Morty picks up the phone and holds it up so that he and his Rick can both see it. The screen shows something like a heat-map of the Citadel, with the calmest areas shown in a pale blue and scaling through the color spectrum to orange for the most agitated areas. He taps an icon labeled "last tracked Rick", and the view zooms in on what appears to be a small apartment over a bar and presents him with an error message: "RICK V-459 DECEASED".

Sigma continues. "Usually we go together because that's how we do everything, but my Rick went alone this time. V-459 is-- was-- an electrician for the Citadel's central maintenance department, my Rick wanted me to stay behind because he didn't want me tangling with a guy who plays with Petawatts in his spare time, if it got violent."

"Why would anybody you're rescuing get violent with you? Isn't that a little.. counterproductive?"

Rick swigs from his flask and shrugs. "Not every Rick wants to be saved, especially not from himself, by himself. If another Rick showed up out of nowhere to tell me that he was there to help me before I did anything to hurt myself or the people around me, I'd proUURbably deck him."

"Exactly." Sigma sighs, and goes back to his work. "A-anyway, that's... that's what he's in for. I'm still hoping they didn't know who he was, but he's got a couple of identifying characteristics, so... probably not."

"Do they know he's got a soulmate mark?" Rick asks.

Sigma balks; if Morty had been drinking anything, he would have spit it out. "I-- I don't-- h-how did you know about that?"

"Simple, I'm not an idiot." Rick points to Sigma's sleeve. "Your dimension has soulmates, you keep rubbing your wrist through your sleeve, and you spent the whole time you were supposed to be using a homing signal looking at pictures on your phone. Do they know he has one, and do they know what your kind of marks can do?"

"I don't think so... but if they didn't before, they do now." Sigma feels like an idiot. Of course you can't hide that kind of thing from a Rick. "Whatever you're going to say about a Rick and a Morty being soulmates, y-y-you can save it, we're not--"

"I don't give a shit, Man-Purse, cool your jets. I'm asking because if he's been in custody since Sunday, they might have found a way to track you through him. That means we need to get moving, so _hurry the Hell up_  and let's get _moving_ , turd."

"R-right. Sorry."

Sigma goes back to work, and after a few moments, finds what he was looking for. "Here we go: Rick Sanchez, Dimension G-108-Epsilon. Considered armed and dangerous, wanted alive for posession of contraband materials, misuse of Citadel resources, falsifying documents, identity theft, felony tax evasion, encouraging the dereliction of a Morty, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, Rickicide... Jesus, this is even longer than I thought. Has he been moonlighting? What the Hell?"

"Morty, _focus_ , what does it say about where he is now?"

"Right, sorry-- um, okay. Writ of attainder issued for immediate incarceration, live capture only, suspect is pre-processed at Penitent Rick Correctional. Okay, I know where that is! We can--"

"Wait, there's a scroll bar, what does it say at the bottom?" Morty leans forward on the desk, pointing.

Rick watches over Morty's shoulder as Sigma follows his instruction, and it shows an image: a scan of a handwritten memo, with the Citadel's official seal printed on the letterhead and the name **PRESIDENT MORTIMER SMITH** emblazoned across the top.

"Holy shit, the Citadel elected a _Morty?_  A _Morty_  is running this anal-retentive shitshow?!" Rick stares. "What the Hell kind of Morty supports sending people to prison without a trial?!"

"The kind that runs the Citadel like a prison..." Morty murmurs. It's so easy to connect the dots. The travel restrictions, the taxes, the fees, the bureacratic red tape, left to coexist with disgusting distractions that they can only indulge in here, so that the Ricks of the Citadel will run on that hamster wheel until they have a psychotic break. And now, this Morty apparently ordered the capture of a Rick whose biggest crime was trying to save himselves from it. "...because he wants to punish Ricks."

Without thinking, he reaches for Rick, curls his fingers in the fabric of his labcoat like most people would do to hold someone's hand. Equally reflexive, Rick lets his arm rest against Morty's back, his hand resting on his shoulder. If either of them had been even a little more self-conscious, it might have gone differently, but as it is, they both actually feel a little better.

Sigma swallows, and he clenches his fists in his sleeves as he reads it aloud. " _Once captured, G-108E is to be taken to Central and remitted to Executive Agent custody and escorted to MUD. Failure to comply will result in your immediate termination. You will also lose your job_.'" He frowns. "Where the fuck is "mud"?"

Morty's gone white as a sheet.

Rick just takes another swig from his flask. "Not mud, Man-Purse. M-U-D. Machine of Unspeakable Doom."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! Houseguest has finally left, and I can write freely again. Thank you for your patience, questions, criticism and comments are always welcome.


	8. Chapter 8

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Machine of-- unspeakable doom?" The color drains out of Sigma's face so fast he might as well have been bleeding from the neck. "Wh-what is that?"

"It's a punishment thing, the Council sentenced my Rick to it once." Morty frowns. "How do you not know? The Machine of Unspeakable Doom is.. I mean, that's gotta be unique to the Citadel, you'd think judges would sentence people to it all the time."

"Maybe not." Rick opens his phone, briefly checking the Citadel's intranet on the off-chance the Machine's inmates been made public on any level, and finds nothing of note; apparently, it's still a secret. "Y-y-you gotta remember, Morty, you're talking to Public Enemy Number One over here. Any law enforcement that gets its hands on me doesn't dick around with iron bars and zip-ties, they probably don't throw every shoplifter in that thing. Hell, it could have been a Council secret for all we know, that crowd of murmuring douchebags could have b--"

"But what does it DO?" Sigma asks again, too upset to remember not to raise his voice. "What the fuck did the Council of Ricks consider " _unspeakable_ "? What are they doing to my Rick?!"

"It, um. Swaps your..." Morty frowns, thinking, and then states, "... Swaps your conscious and unconscious minds, rendering your fantasies pointless while everything you've known becomes impossible to grasp. And every ten seconds, it stabs your balls."

Rick and Sigma both stare in disbelief, for different reasons: Sigma, for the bizarre cruelty of the concept, and Rick, for the near-perfect recall and recitation.

"Holy shit, Morty. Y-you got a mega seed up there or what?"

"What? No! Jeez, Rick, now's not the time to be gross." Morty scowls and lets go of Rick's coat, folding his arms over his chest defensively, though he's just as surprised as the other two. If his memory was that good all the time, he'd probably be a straight-A student. "I just... I don't know, I just remember that's what that Rick with the stupid clown hair said."

Sigma wrings his hands. "Do you know what it means?"

"Not really. I mean, except for the ball-stabbing part. Fantasies are already kind of pointless and you don't need to 'grasp' anything you already know, so..."

Both Mortys look expectantly up at Rick for an explanation; Rick makes an annoyed grunt and rolls his eyes before focusing on Sigma.

"It means your Rick is--" He starts to whip out a scathing description of what the Machine of Unspeakable Doom was built to do; the words are waiting in his mouth like a bullet in the chamber, but his grandson's sharp glare of disapproval hits him like a rolled-up newspaper.

Rick clears his throat and tries again, this time with a slightly gentler tone. "It means we need to get him out as soon as possible."

Sigma pales; for C-137 to show any kind of empathy or kindness by minding his words, it _has_ to be bad. "Don't-- don't sugar coat it, please? What's really happening to him right now?"

The old man shoots his Morty a dirty look-- _look, I tried_ \-- before he lays it out, making a sincere effort to be kind in his response despite being directly asked for brutal honesty. The truth is that the Machine of Unspeakable Doom was designed to be a Rick's personal Hell: right now, Sigma's Rick is likely wandering in a fog of chaotic nonsense, trying to process the real world as if it were a disturbing, abstract dream. "Look, it-- i-it's complicated, but the bottom line is that he can't understand anything happening to him right now, all he knows is that he's in pain. His mind is scrambled to the point that he can't even fantasize about escaping."

Sigma says something, but Rick's not paying attention; for reasons he can't quite name, he's actually looking to his own Morty to see if his explanation passed inspection. Morty doesn't say anything, but his warm, appreciative smile is unmistakable, and Rick takes the opportunity to scratch that itchy spot between his shoulderblades and pretend he didn't see it (and to pretend he didn't like it).

"--all I have now, a-and I don't know how to go from here," Sigma confesses, apparently not realizing that nobody's been listening to him. "I can sense what direction he's in, but our bond can't plot a path for me to follow, and I have no idea where they keep this Unspeakable Doom thing. I... I may have wasted your time, guys, I'm sorry, I--"

"Oh, mop it up, Man-Purse, I know where it is." Rick takes out his portal gun. "But if I'm taking you there, we're not taking the scenic route. We portal in, we get your Rick, we portal back to the impound yard and get the fuck off the Shitadel, end of story."

"But what if--"

"No more what-if's!" Morty steps in front of Sigma, ostensibly to cut Rick off from snapping Sigma's neck. "I know you're scared. Your only real weapon against a Rick is preparation, a-a-and you don't think you could ever be prepared enough to face a whole army of them, and you know your Rick is alive but you're afraid of what condition he's really in. I get it. It's terrifying."

Sigma nods in agreement and blinks away the sting of oncoming tears, trying to stave off the fatigue and the despair that's been snapping at his heels since he first set out to find his Rick. "He's been in there for _days_ , Morty, my Rick is--"

  
"Your Rick is running out of time, _my_ Rick is running out of patience, and I'm seriously starting to hate how much you're taking after our dad!" His hands snap out to catch his counterpart by his shirtfront, jolting him out of his wibbling and demanding his undivided attention. "You either get your shit together right now, or you let your soulmate die. What's it gonna be?"

  
Sigma's eyes widen at the sudden manhandling, startled and struck silent for the moment. It doesn't take more than few tense heartbeats for him to realize that Morty's right: he's terrified that he might finally get his soulmate back, only to discover that his Rick is too broken to function. He could be comatose, or paralyzed from the neck down, or worse; the thought is so horrible it turns his stomach just to imagine it.  His Rick, bedridden and unresponsive on their sad little asteroid, unable to do anything but wait for death as Sigma passes between dimensions, searching for someone willing to heal him out of the goodness of their heart-- and that's only if he doesn't run out of his last drop of portal fluid and strand himself.  At least if they both die in the same universe, there's some hope that they'll be able to find each other in the afterlife that Sigma somehow desperately still believes in.

Behind Morty, Rick has to stop himself from outright cheering-- not just because Morty's openly backing him up (with a bonus insult to Jerry even!) but because watching his clearly-superior Morty drop an ultimatum on his other self is about as satisfying and exciting as a game-winning grand slam at the bottom of the ninth.

Sigma's faintly-trembling fingers curl tightly in his duffle bag's shoulder strap as his thoughts race through an obstacle course of fear and anxiety; they stumble over the unknowns and the unanswerable questions-- _we don't know enough; how is it guarded, how are the prisoners housed, what security measures do they use?_ \-- but Morty's succinct ultimatum sweeps it all aside like the clutter it's become.

  
"You're right. Y-you're absolutely right, I'm sorry I've been pussing out on you." He takes a breath and scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Thank you."

"Good." Morty lets Sigma's shirt loose, and he snaps a smirk up at Rick. "Anything else?"

"Nope! Time to Rambo up-- if you brought weapons, break 'em out." Good humor fully restored, Rick takes a quick hit from his flask. "I'm gonna open a portal and clear the room. Give it a count of three before you follow me in, though, I don't need any friendly fire issues."

Sigma fiddles with his phone for a second and produces two pairs of firing-range safety glasses out of his bag; he hands one of them to his counterpart, and the subether phone announces itself with a pinch harmonic and Rick's voice declaring, " _MortimaxHUD sync successful. Be safe, Morty._ "

Rick raises an eyebrow. "Mortimax? Really?"

"I-it's just an augmented reality display, my Rick made it for me. My original, not-- not the one we're looking for." Sigma pulls his shortened-stock laser carbine out of his duffle bag, the iron sights glowing the same iconic Morty-yellow of the glasses. "It keeps track of your charge level, auto-calibrates every twenty seconds when your weapon is idle and shot correction when it's in use, plus it has environmental alerts and communication and stuff like that-- i-it can actually sync with most of my devices and it's super helpful, but this is all we're needing right now."

"Whatever works. What about you, Morty? You ready to go?"

Morty's got a whole full backpack, stuffed to the seams with medical supplies and tools, but no firearms. Instead, he pulls out a crowbar; he hefts it in one hand, pats the heel of the hook end into his other palm, satisfied with the weight of it. This completed, he scratches his shoulder with the claw end and tosses a confident grin up at his Rick. "Let's go show these cheap knock-offs what the real thing can do."

Rick only balks at Morty for a half-second before his face answers with a grin so bright and sharp that it makes the hair on the back of Morty's neck stand up. The old man's hand whips his portal gun out of his coat with practiced, fluid ease, and then that smile is painted bright green from the light of the portal splattering onto the wall, and the instant, sinister red of the security system responding angrily to its presence.  If he didn't know better, he just might mistake it for pride.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter, just because I needed a little buffer between this scene and the next.


End file.
